Like many people, I'm a big fan of quickfire submarine horror adventure Iron Lung. Yet despite receiving rave reviews and spawning a film adaptation by Markiplier, surprisingly few games have picked up its baton of vehicular terror. There are other submarine horror games like Barotrauma, as well as job-based horror games like Klekta and Shift at Midnight. But the former has quite a different vibe, while the latter pair seem more inspired by Lethal Company than David Szymanski's 2022 horror.

Which is why I'm so intrigued by The Temple, an upcoming Half-Life 2 total conversion that likewise lets players pilot a terror submarine. But the temple ups the ante by adapting the scares into two other forms of transportation, taking players out of the depths all the way up into space.

The Temple is set on an aquatic planet dotted by strange, concrete megastructures, which you're tasked with exploring using three separate vehicles. One, as mentioned, is a submarine that will take you into the depths of its ocean. The others are an airship for exploring its skies and abandoned towers, and a space shuttle that lets you travel to asteroidal moons that orbit the planet.

The Temple was originally released as a pair of maps for MapLabs, a mod that collects together maps from various Source engine modding competitions. While that initial version was fairly short—around 20 minutes in length—the total conversion will revamp and expand those two existing maps, while also adding a third map for over two hours of exploration-based sci-fi horror.

There's a trailer for the mod that you can watch above, which shows all three of its vehicles in action. For a short Half-Life 2 mod, it looks pretty accomplished, with a real eye for colossal structures. The mod also features Amnesia: The Dark Descent-style invisible water monsters, and a talking crow (or at least, a crow whose corvid language you can understand), which will help guide you through the experience.

That alone is sufficient to convince me to check The Temple out. While there's no specific release date for The Temple yet, its creator, who goes by Klems, says that it will launch "very soon, possibly next month".

Opening the auxiliary lines at the end of Part 6 in Silent Hill: Townfall is perhaps its most complicated yet simple puzzle. By this point in the game my brain was completely fried and my nerves were shot. So in case you're also in a bad spot, here are some tips to point you in the right direction.

Spoilers ahead for Silent Hill: Townfall

How to get to the Auxiliary Room

Before you head to the elevator and go up to the auxiliary room, you'll need to get the key. This can be found in the command centre, and the code to get into it is 0825. Inside, you'll find the key to the auxiliary room. Now you can head downstairs to the elevator, but be warned—this is where The Weight and other monsters are lurking, so you need to be cautious. You can make a mercy dash to the elevator as the doors close quickly, but it'll be tight.

Once you've made it to the next floor, there'll be a couple of smaller monsters who you can easily circumvent. Make sure to close the door to the auxiliary room once you're inside.

How to open the auxiliary lines

Here you'll find a pipe running across the walls with levers at various intervals. There's also a locker and a desk with a terminal. The first step is to open the locker and find the floppy disk. Then, head to the terminal and use the floppy disk to get your clue: a bunch of lines.

At first glance, this could look like morse code or some other cipher, but actually it's much simpler than it seems: It shows whether each lever needs to be horizontal or vertical. But not every lever is included: only the ones which are adjacent to one white line for the first row, two lines for the second, and three lines for the third.

Auxiliary Line 1

Auxiliary line 1 solution: | _ | | _ | _ | |

The first line starts on the wall next to the locker, just by the white arrow at the bottom of the wall, and includes all the levers which are next to the singular white lines on the pipes. The pattern goes like this:

1. vertical
2. horizontal
3. vertical
4. vertical
5. horizontal
6. vertical
7. horizontal
8. vertical
9. vertical

If you've done it right the light next to the last lever should turn green.

Auxiliary Line 2

Auxiliary line 2 solution: | _ _ _ | _ _ | |

The second line starts on the wall next to the locker by the middle white arrow. The pattern should be:

1. vertical
2. horizontal
3. horizontal
4. horizontal
5. vertical
6. horizontal
7. horizontal
8. vertical
9. vertical

Again, if you've done this right, then the light next to the last lever should turn green.

Auxiliary Line 3

Auxiliary line 3 solution: _ | | | _ | _ |

The third line starts on the opposite wall to the other two, above the second light that just turned green and the pattern should be:

1. horizontal
2. vertical
3. vertical
4. vertical
5. horizontal
6. vertical
7. horizontal
8. vertical

Again, if you've done it right the final light will turn green. That's the end of that, and now you can leave the room (be careful of the creepies), head back to the elevator, and make your way back to the control room (avoiding The Weight and other monsters) to wrap up your segment in the command centre.

I've played enough horror games at this point to wonder whether I'd be any good at actually surviving one. While some games are simply out of the question after finishing Silent Hill: Townfall recently I came to the conclusion that yes, given the right circumstances I'd probably make it to the end. But what about the rest of the PC Gamer team? Well I have an answer for that as well.

I've played enough horror games at this point to wonder whether I'd be any good at actually surviving one. While some games are simply out of the question after finishing Silent Hill: Townfall recently I came to the conclusion that yes, given the right circumstances I'd probably make it to the end. But what about the rest of the PC Gamer team? Well I have an answer for that as well.

We've got a good amount of horror aficionados on the team which helps, and I've given extra points to those of us who've either played Townfall or Silent Hill games similar enough to know what to do in the distressing scenes ahead. But I have to admit most of the list was vibes-based research.

There were only three coworkers I couldn't rank and therefore put them in the 'Wild card' category because they are so utterly unpredictable that they'd either fly through the game or be unable to get out of the water. Or as our own Joshua Wolens put it: "me, Kara, and Andy are about to die horribly in the zombie apocalypse* or prove a very important point."

While I'm positive that every single person on our team could breeze through Townfall's tricky puzzles, the deciding factor are its monsters which start out rather tame but then take a steep difficulty curve towards the end of the game. Even still, I'm fairly confident that about half of the team could make it to the end of the game. As for the rest? Godspeed soldiers.

*Josh thought we were talking about Resident Evil.

Like it or not, Zach Cregger's Resident Evil film has been a critical hit. It reached universal acclaim on metacritic and was a smash hit among the PC Gamer team. I wasn't as fond of it as I hoped to be, but even still I loved the ride and appreciated its faithful adaptation of the videogames.

After all this time, I never thought a Resident Evil adaptation could be as good as this. Now, its success is mostly thanks to Zach Cregger's genuine admiration and great knowledge of the games, but some accolades also needs to go to Roy Lee, the film's producer and the person who secured the rights to Resident Evil after Cregger expressed interest in it.

Lee has also worked on other videogame adaptations such as A Minecraft Movie and (as reported by the Wall Street Journal) he currently has 20 movies and TV shows in development and production, which are based on games like Battlefield, God of War, and—my god: Silent Hill.

I am even less sure of someone being able to pull off a genuinely good Silent Hill adaptation than I was about Resident Evil, so I am morbidly intrigued to know more about this venture. But sadly that's all we know so far, there's no word on whether this will be a film or a TV series, so we'll just have to sit and wait for the fateful day when more is revealed.

But that won't stop fans from speculating or, more realistically, fearing what we now know to be the inevitable. The top comment on a Reddit thread discussing this adaptation simply reads: "For the love of James Sunderland keep Christophe Gans away from it!"

Yeah I get it—Gans' 2006 Silent Hill film adaptation leaves much to be desired. While I'll always defend the beautiful cinematography of Dan Lausten in this film, its writing and plot is convoluted and pretty confusing. Nostalgia has done that film a world of good for me, in so much that I look back on it kind of fondly now, appreciating the love that the people who worked on it clearly had for the games even if they didn't stick the landing.

Unfortunately, Return to Silent Hill is simply too bad and too recent for any kind of nostalgia to ease the pain. I'm not sure why Gans is completely opposed to staying true to the complex, vulnerable, and unlikable qualities of its male protagonists, but it's done nothing but hurt the adaptations. So I too will echo the above sentiment of: please, for the love of James Sunderland, do not let Christophe Gans anywhere near this upcoming project.

Silent Hill: Townfall has a different kind of resonance if you grew up in the UK. Its Scottish island of St Amelia is already my favourite video game environment of the year for how it evokes the atmosphere and time of a place—specifically 1996—and captures the specific details of small town life.

From the video rental shop to the bunting sadly hanging from the buildings, it's the kind of run-down fishing town you never normally see in a video game. That's probably because it's not as glamorous as somewhere like Kamurocho in Tokyo (St Amelia regrettably lacks a Sega World) or New York, and not as dreamy as the Stephen King-inflected small town settings of games like Alan Wake or Silent Hill 2.

Using the Silent Hill franchise as this trojan horse to smuggle in a location that's clearly of interest to the Glasgow-based development team at Screen Burn was a marvellous idea: given the state of the games industry, it's unlikely that anyone will ever again be given the budget or time to craft an authentic British newsagent or storefront for a fish and chip shop.

Still, as eerily authentic as St Amelia's exterior details are, like the telephone boxes and road signs, it's the interiors that I find uniquely settling. Here's why: my grandparents basically lived in the houses in this game.

The kitchen tiling, the heaters, the wallpaper, the appliances—it's so forensically accurate to a certain type of house. The kind of places that were last renovated in the '70s or '80s and haven't been touched since, maybe because the residents were too old to want to redecorate or because they couldn't afford to do so. When I step into these homes in Silent Hill: Townfall, my gut response is, "I've been here before and I hate it."

'70s chic

The artists at Screen Burn didn't just capture 1996 in some of these homes, they pinpointed the environmental details that were old even then. That's next level visual craft, assisted by things like ancient Argos catalogues.

"Some genius out there had scanned every Argos catalogue for the last 30 years," game director Jon McKellan told us at Gamescom, "and we were like looking at them and finding out, OK, if we need a TV in '90s, let's look at the catalogue from the '90s and find out which one would be more appropriate."

I sent the above screenshots to my mum. "That is my parents’ house," she confirmed about the first two images, talking about a terrace house somewhere in the midlands. "We all huddled round that gas fire."

To me and many other British players there will be an extra nightmarish layer to the game because of this familiarity. Seeing a world that you know you've visited before but that is now totally lost is uniquely unsettling.

Why am I fixated on this? Well, I have encountered this feeling of nostalgic spookiness before when I've watched old British TV stuff like the ultra-cursed Tales of the Unexpected or Threads, but never in a game.

Maybe the game's 1996 setting is just to satisfy director Jon McKellan's love of analogue tech, which is similarly front-and-centre in the likes of Stories Untold and Alien: Isolation, but these interiors feel like the result of a hundred artistic choices.

That specificity in the environmental design, to me, is quietly the best thing about Silent Hill: Townfall (with apologies to the actual game bit, which I am enjoying even if I'm swearing at the stealth sections a whole lot).

Even the likes of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture or Atomfall tend to romanticise elements of British life in their countryside locations. Silent Hill: Townfall blots out any potential warmth of these empty houses by surrounding them with fog, towering walls and monsters, and making them the backdrop for a gnarly psychological horror story.

Still Wakes the Deep got a bit closer to this feeling, being a '70s period piece set off the coast of Scotland—but that took place on an oil rig, and living on one of those isn't exactly a universal experience.

The thing is, to my parents' generation, the types of houses you explore in Townfall are just the places they grew up in. My mum says she finds '70s interior design quite warm and comforting. This clicked something else into place for me about why I find these details frightening: it's probably just an age thing.

When I watched this year's mega hit film Backrooms, I came out of it wondering why the children all found it so frightening. I'm doomed to know the concept of a 'liminal space' from the amount of time I spend online, of course, but what they seemed to be afraid of was basically an empty Woolworths retail unit.

I get that any empty space that's supposed to have people in it can be quite eerie, but the basis of an entire online mythology and $400 million movie? That was strange to me. But that's really a younger audience's version of what I'm experiencing here.

My theory is, whatever ordinary place seems old to you is inherently unsettling. The things that we find normal now will seem otherworldly, grim and strange to future generations.

One day, someone will make a horror game set in a strip mall with a gorgeously rendered bubble tea shop, vape shop and Apple Store. And to me, it won't be a horror game at all. It'll be a documentary.

You may have qualms about my top picks for changeable Resident Evil villains, but I will die on this hill. Let me tell you why.

Donna Beneviento would be the easiest to change, for sure. I could already tell in Resident Evil Village that her heart wasn't in it, and I think all I'd have to do is say some nice things about her dolls and then bingo, she's on a better, healthier path.

Surprisingly, I think the same goes for Alex Wesker. Yes, she's got a god-complex, but I think I could use that to my advantage, because at the end of the day all a god-complex is is a need to be liked mixed in with some good old fashioned narcissism, and I've managed a fair few people with that. Plus I have low blood iron so she probably wouldn't want to snatch my body.

Then we get into trickier territory. Albert Wesker and T-00 (Mr. X).

My first step with T-00 would be to ditch the rocket launcher. I know this is risky, but fear is not a healthy emotion to build fruitful discussions around, and trust is a two way street. The next course of action I'd take would be giving him a real name. Mr. X is cool if you're a villain in a '90s Saturday morning cartoon, but it's a bit too formal. I think he looks like a Jeff and suspect he'd appreciate being humanised.

When it comes to Albert Wesker I have nothing else to back up my claim that I could change him other than a feeling in my bones that I could do it and the fact I have a winning smile and a can-do attitude.

But I'd like to hear from you guys, too. Do you think you could change any or all of the Resident Evil villains for good? And if you'd even want to talk to Salvatore Moreau (aka fish boy from Resident Evil Village)—it's a no from me.

My God, they've done it. We're finally in the era when videogame movies can actually be good. Not just good for a videogame movie, or "It's good, but here are 50 caveats." It's simply brilliant. And Resi's lovably feckless protagonist Bryan is the primary reason. But before I dive in, I need to warn you about something.

Yep, this is going to be spoiler city. Spoilers for days, folks! Spoilers as big as your head—if your head is exceedingly large. So I'm going to give you ample time to stop scrolling. I am here to protect you.

You must have stopped scrolling by now, right?

OK, this is your last chance to avoid spoilers, folks!

OK, great, I am now free to spoil the heck out of this excellent movie. Hurray!

The best thing filmmaker Zach Cregger did with Resident Evil was leave the heroes in the games. Bryan is not a hero. He's not skilled with firearms like Leon, nor does he have huge, rock-punching arms like Chris. He's just a tired dork trying to complete his last job of the night.

Bryan is not some stand-in for the protagonists we know and love—he is effectively a Resident Evil player, transported into a Resident Evil crisis. He's a more specific kind of everyman, one who reflects Resi fans.

His ear-demolishing screams, his silly mistakes, his complete lack of knowledge about firearms (he has used them in videogames), his cowardice and ineptitude—all of these traits transform Resident Evil from the over-the-top action movies we're normally stuck with into a survival horror romp that you can laugh at.

His cowardice and ineptitude aren't even that noteworthy, in that it's how most of us would react in this situation. He's as cowardly and incompetent as the average Resident Evil player would be if they were thrown into an actual apocalypse. This means his mistakes and near misses aren't frustrating. We're not sitting there thinking, "I could do better". Instead we empathise. I'm not judging you. I'd suck at this too.

That said, he does fuck up a lot. For your convenience, here's a list of his dumb mistakes:

• He lies about having tire chains so he can make a quick buck, inadvertently putting the whole world at risk.
• Instead of focusing on the ice-covered road, he keeps looking at his phone, leading to his first accident.
• He shoots at a t-Virus victim, but instead hits his own vehicle several times, stranding himself in a field.
• He drops a ladder that he needs five seconds later, resulting in a nasty fall.
• He taunts an aggressive dog, which then reveals itself to be a mutant.
• He wastes ammo on a padlock even after realising it can withstand a blast from a shotgun.
• He totals his stolen vehicle seconds after getting it by trying to ram a gate.
• He tries to pick up a mutated child even after he's seen a lot of shit. It ends badly.
• Instead of shooting the gestalt t-Virus mutant, he shoots the ground right next to his feet.
• He fails to load a clip several times, and once he finally does it, he shoots his new gun inside a vehicle.
• He accidentally shoots an Umbrella employee in the leg instead of saving him.
• When he finally, miraculously, makes it to the Raccoon City hospital, he gives up because the lifts don't work.
• Even after being told to use the stairs, his laziness gets the better of him after four flights. He finds a working lift and uses it. Again, it ends badly.

Damn, Bryan, you are bad at this. Cregger said he had to cut out a lot of the humour because test audiences found it too funny, but Resident Evil still left me laughing constantly. Not because it's full of incongruous gags. It's a pure horror movie rather than a comedy-horror romp. But the situations Bryan finds himself in, and the way he keeps fucking up, it's a gas.

Resident Evil is at its best early on, and I know it lost some folk when Bryan started to transform into a badass. He survives a collapsing lift, weaponises an acid-spewing mutant, deftly makes it across a vertigo-inducing chasm, and then he uses his final bullet in the coolest way possible. He becomes an absolute boss.

But I'm convinced this is in keeping with the movie's tone.

This is what it's like to play Resident Evil—at least if you're me. I tend to spend the first couple of hours jumping out of my skin whenever I see a shadow or hear a footstep. I'm a wreck. My shooting is panicked, my screams are frequent, and I spend a great deal of time hiding. But by the end of these games I am able to embody Leon, Chris, Jill, Ethan and all the rest. I am a grizzled survivor pulling off impossible stunts.

Resident Evil doesn't just ask, "How would a Resident Evil player handle a real t-Virus outbreak?" It also attempts to capture the actual experience of playing the games. And it does so incredibly skillfully.

This is why it's the best videogame movie. Even though it features none of the familiar faces and takes plenty of liberties, it ends up feeling more authentic than a movie that's aiming for a 1:1 recreation of Resident Evil 2. It tries something different, and in doing so it ends up being a canny recreation of the Resi experience. And on top of that, it's simply a great horror movie. If you don't care about Resi, it's still going to be a hoot.

Walking up to the old town of St Amelia for the first time in Silent Hill: Townfall, I was greeted by that familiar thick fog and eerie quiet—an omen of the horrors to come. I know what kind of monsters are waiting for me beyond the fog and I am painfully aware of just how unprepared I am for it—with no flashlight, healing items, or weapon on hand. But weirdly enough none of that matters, because for the first time in a Silent Hill game I feel content.

St Amelia is a fictional town, but as I'm sure many players based in the UK will soon discover, developer Screen Burn breathes so much life into this sleepy fishing village that I could've sworn I'd been here before. It's certainly a strange feeling to have in a game like this, but with Konami opening Silent Hill up to the world it's now the UK's turn to have our sense of home toyed with.

Here to suffer

The story follows Simon Ordell, a man unknown to us and himself. The only sense of person he has comes from a medical bracelet with his name, date of birth, and blood type written on it. I watched as he dragged himself up from the waves of the North Sea, onto the docks, and headed into St Amelia seeking help and answers as to why he's here on this cold foggy island.

A Silent Hill game is nothing without its setting and St Amelia delivers. I spent more time than I'd care to admit reading info boards about the history of fishing on the island and peeping over fences to see how the locals had done up their gardens. The more I explored, the better sense I got of the kind of people who lived in this town and what had happened to them.

Simon also sees more than just the old town as he ventures to a hospital, a corporate office, your classic Silent Hill supernatural 'other place', and, brace yourself, some new builds. My time in St Amelia flew by rather quickly, with just 13 hours spent in total, but that was more than enough to be rewarded with heaps of brilliant visual storytelling and the usual gift of stressful encounters.

St Amelia has its fair share of gut-wrenching horrors lurking around each corner, though—you don't spend a grand total of 35 minutes and five seconds hiding in lockers unless there's something pretty bad waiting for you on the other side. But even still, I found myself drawn to exploring the fog because my curiosity outweighed my fear.

But the further I progressed the less content I became. Not because there were more faceless and bound monsters stumbling around (although that didn't help), but because there was more to the island than St Amelia's historic old town. There was a side that was painfully familiar—cobblestone streets shifted into tarmac roads and cottages were turned into flats for better efficiency. The island changed as Simon moved away from the heart of St Amelia and towards the parasite which had latched onto it.

The town itself felt alive more than just lived in, and if that doesn't tick all the boxes for a world-class Silent Hill setting, I don't know what does.

Try to B positive

A good rule of thumb in Silent Hill is to approach its puzzles with lateral thinking, and Townfall is no different. They start fairly easy, coaching you in the art of taking in absolutely everything from your surroundings, digesting it, and then stitching together an answer from what has been gathered. It's the classic case of finding the combination to a lock by sifting through letters conveniently left scattered around the near vicinity.

But as I spent more time in St Amelia, my brain gradually got the hang of looking at things from a Silent Hill perspective. And although the puzzles got harder it didn't feel like a noticeable difference. Hell, the first thing I thought when stumbling across a bunch of blood types scribbled across the wall was "This is a puzzle and it wants me to figure out how to create blood type A+". If it weren't for the 7+ hours I'd already spent in Townfall I doubt that would have been my default response.

There were a few exceptions towards the very end of the game, however, I think a fresh brain would have had far less issues. Take the dreaded pipe room for example, where I had to use what looked to be morse code to twist a room full of levers in the right direction. After bashing my head against my desk my synapses sparked, a thought was formed, and I figured it out—I wish you all the best of luck with that one.

The puzzles aren't the only smart design features in Townfall, though, with the best and brightest being the handheld CRTV. This quickly became my closest companion as it allowed me to see the creepies through any wall or obstacle. It may seem like a bit of a cheat code getting to know where the monsters are but there are some limitations.

It's not always crystal clear where the monsters were, sometimes the CRTV could be a smidge off or it wouldn't relay that a monster is actually further away than it first seemed. It also can't show multiple enemies on one frequency, which means I had to toggle between several to see all the monsters that were close.

I wouldn't say I'm much of a pacifist but I opted to forgo the planks of wood, pipes, and firearms for most of the game, instead favouring the CRTV as my weapon against the monsters to help me stealth around them. I played on the normal difficulty and I didn't have a run in with a monster until quite far into the latter stages of the game. They're not blind, I was just able to move around them with some ease if I used the CRTV correctly and was cautiously optimistic about how fast Simon could run.

Even with all its finicky buttons the CRTV may be the most creative, fun, and useful puzzle solving tool I've ever had the pleasure of playing with. It turned navigating Townfall into one big scary puzzle, which is exactly what I look for in Silent Hill.

You can't change

But all of these amazing puzzles and fantastic world building would be for nought if Townfall hadn't also been able to pull off the kind of beautiful and psychologically jarring storytelling we've come to expect from the Silent Hill series.

To say there's something wrong with Simon would be to state the obvious. We're in a Silent Hill game after all, and no one in their sound mind would hallucinate grotesque faceless monsters which shoot needles out from their abdomens. But the fact that there's something off about Simon isn't what interests me—the fun part is finding out what he did to end up like this. It's clear that people in the town are angry, that some awful disaster happened on this island which rocked its community to its core. What's unclear, however, is why it involves some seemingly random American dude with induced amnesia.

But Simon's not on his own. There are two other characters who also inhabit this liminal space with him—Zoe and Richard. At first I just thought these to be your typical filler characters but as it turns out these two are perhaps the most interesting characters to have ever fallen into the fog.

Zoe and Richard portray different sides of the same disaster that Simon's caught in the middle of, with one being wrongfully guilty and the other willfully ignorant. Both have their own playable segments within the game in which their characters are explored in depth alongside the roles they played in the catastrophe, and through this I began to piece together Simon's story.

My favourite sequence in all of Townfall was actually Zoe's part. In this she relives the aftermath of the disaster as a nurse and a first responder to the victims as she tries to save the life of an unknown patient.

I am not a trained nurse so taking the patient's readings, running tests, and ultimately medicating them was probably one of the more stressful experiences I've had in a horror game. But it was worth it because through the stress I understood her guilt and trauma with painful clarity. It also made it clear why she's found herself wrapped up in this mess.

Then there's Richard who is an opposite to Zoe in every sense of the word. He's not blameless or caring; he's an asshole. But boy, is he an interesting character study. I won't go into too much detail concerning Richard as his story is one that is better experienced firsthand. But, like with Zoe, after playing through his sequence it became clear to me what this game's curse is. While the answer seemed simple at first examining the curse through the lens of three different characters adds enough diversity for an incredibly rewarding story and analysis of its characters.

My only issue with Townfall was that I didn't get to spend more time with Zoe and Richard, because in comparison Simon is just a little boring. His role as a blank template for players to print themselves onto worked wonders for immersion but ultimately his character suffered for it. I found myself drawn more to Zoe and Richard, two characters who had more invested in this community from the get go.

That's not to say I dislike Simon. He's a fantastic character who comes into his own during the latter stages of the story and is someone who will grow on me the more time I spend mulling Townfall over.

After all was said and done and I'd finally reached the end of Townfall's brilliant story, my overwhelming feeling was one of relief. Like Silent Hill f before it, Townfall had some monumental expectations to live up to and the unenviable task of proving that yet again the mystique of Silent Hill is not limited to one mountainous town. But it's now clear that Screen Burn absolutely understands what makes a great Silent Hill game and the series is better off for it.

"Oh man, can't wait to fly this plane through the fog around these spooky towers. I sure hope I don't lose my mind like the guy who did this job before me." That's what I imagine the protagonist of The Hollowing thought right before he climbed into the cockpit and promptly started to lose it.

We just saw the world premiere trailer for The Hollowing at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct. It's a first-person horror flight sim made by Rubeki, developer of Lorn's Lure, and this is even set in the same world.

The Hollowing has the same signature PSX aesthetic, which I'm a big fan of for horror games. It's also great for speed, because this new project has been revealed barely two years after the dev's previous game came out.

In The Hollowing, you've got to fly between towers in a huge megastructure, fixing them up as you go so that the settlements in the place can stay in touch with one another. It's just you, your plane, the fog, and a voice on the radio.

Throughout the trailer, they give snippets of what happened to the previous pilot. Apparently they'd hear strange interference on the radio, and "spore toxicity" gave them visions. Maybe that fog is even more ominous than it seems.

By the end of the teaser, it's obvious the same issues are affecting our new pilot, Phil. I guess they're not built differently after all. There's no release date for The Hollowing just yet, so if you want to stay up to date with the game, wishlist it on Steam.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

At first glance you could be forgiven for thinking Dust till Dawn was a simple cleaning game. Early into the World Premiere trailer, showing the game off for the very first time during the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, it seems very mundane at first glance as you clean your way around a Japanese apartment, little cash amounts floating off of each item as you scrub it and put it back in place.

Then, it twists and music from Akira Yamaoka, composer of the Silent Hill games, kicks in and you see the dual nature of Dust till Dawn, which is not just a cleaning game but also a horror, somehow. Don't worry though, you'll still be asked to clean to the best of your ability, even as everything goes to hell around you.

I find eyes unspeakably creepy, despite having several of them tattooed on me, and as a result Dust till Dawn's trailer, which is pretty big on spooky peepers, terrifies me. I'm quite a big fan of the game's aesthetic, which has twisting geometry and early 90s stylings that make it feel like the classic Japanese horror movies of yesteryear. Not that I'll be able to play it, because in addition to being terrified of spooky eyes, I'm also scared of horror games in general, and this looks to be a fairly effective one.

Dust till Dawn comes from Mac n Cheese Games, also developing the "nuns in space" survival horror Void Martyrs. With Dust till Dawn, with an elevator pitch of "Spooky Clean 'Em Up", Mac n Cheese seem to be nailing the one sentence reasons to play its horror games.

If the trailer for Dust till Dawn has whet your appetite, you can wishlist it on Steam here, or check out everything in the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct on the Steam page. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

There is, you must admit, something a bit disconcerting about children's toys. The sightless eyes, the static expressions—it all combines into a hollow unpersonhood that triggers some ancient, primeval fear in the low regions of your brain. Something that also doesn't help: the unslakeable lust for murder.

Alright, that last part maybe does not apply to my childhood teddy bear, but it does apply to the nightmarish denizens of Escape From Playtime, which just announced it's accepting playtest sign-ups at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct.

Set in the Poppy Playtime universe—one of those things which is quietly wildly popular—Escape From Playtime bills itself as a 1-4 player co-op survival horror that puts you in the shoes of the setting's Smiling Critters. These are A) haunting and B) probably relatively benign, as inhabitants of this world go. Your goal is to explore an abandoned toy factory at the behest of an ominous voice, who tasks you with finding building materials and other resources with which to do… something really benevolent, probably.

We get a glimpse of the game's creepy puzzle-solving, traversal, and hiding-from-dread-beasts-beyond-comprehension action in the trailer. The Smiling Critters are very small, which means you are even more defenceless than you might have thought possible, and also navigating a lot of environments designed for full-size people as not-full-size animal facsimiles.

It's a whole lot to process, really. You're gonna be making a lot of regrettable decisions about when to split up with your friends, when to hide, when to run, and when to greedily run back to that one room to gather up a resource you missed. This will not end well for you, I think, but I suspect it will be rather enjoyable, if you're the kind of person who enjoys holding their breath in a closet while a murderous beast passes by mere inches away. Who isn't? Find out more on Steam.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

I don't know if you've ever watched an Argentinian horror movie. I have, and they're damn scary. I had to watch the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct 2026 minidoc with one hand over my eyes, because Tenebris Somnia blends 2D survival horror gameplay (which I can handle) with live-action cutscenes made by an award-winning Argentinian film crew (and the make up and effects are so good they terrify me).

Tenebris Somnia expertly blends a retro 2D style with filmed cutscenes. One moment you're walking through a creepy, colourful hallway, the next you're watching an actual person's face distort in a way that defies all logic and reason. Dave Oshry, CEO of New Blood Interactive, the publisher of the game, hypes up the practical effects crew, but I'm pretty certain they just cast real demons.

Executive producer Airdorf says it "feels like you're playing through someone's nightmares," and I agree. One creature has an extra face underneath its face, connected via one mouth. That's horrifying. Those effects are mostly made with practical materials, too, which is why they look so damn good. "AI could never make Tenebris Somnia, let's just say that," says Oshry.

So that's the horror, but what about the survival aspect of the game? Well, that sounds like it's going to be pretty good, too. "You will only ever have just enough health," Oshry says. "You will only ever have just enough ammo. You will very often have to resort to a wrench or a pipe." He's wielding a wrench in the video while he explains this.

As for the story. Well, it's described as being relatable to anyone who's been in a troubled relationship. "You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll call your ex," Oshry says. That's the scariest thing about Tenebris Somnia so far.

If this sounds like you're kind of horror, wishlist it now on Steam. Tenebris Somnia launches October 16, 2026, just in time for Halloween.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

I hate flying. Crammed into a tiny metal tube with 100s of other people, 1000s of feet in the air, unnaturally defying the will of God—it's awful. I don't know how flight attendants stay so calm and professional the entire time. At least in the real world they don't have to contend with shape-shifting demons like they do in Night Plane, the upcoming horror job sim from Liquid Static Studio.

In a new trailer unveiled during the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, things get spooky real quick. A deer just stands there, menacingly staring at the flight attendant before they board the Plane Airlines plane, and we see a bloody handprint smeared on the emergency door.

There's also a smattering of eerie shots throughout the airport, looking like something out of The Backrooms. But it's not just the airport and plane, oh no. We catch a few glimpses of a cave and forest, so it looks like the plane crash lands at some point.

And with what was occurring on board, I'm not surprised. Passengers levitating in the air, deer demons charging down the aisle. Awful stuff. On top of all that, you actually have to work.

Night Plane is, at its core, a job simulator. You'll need to check tickets, attend to the needs of the passengers, and try to eject non-human visitors. How you do that without them eviscerating you, I don't know.

It sounds a bit like Papers, Please, only with the added element of my deathly fear of flying, so it seems like a strong horror game. If you want to try it out for yourself, you can download the demo now. And you won't have to wait long for the full release, as the game is coming out October 26, 2026. You can wishlist it on Steam.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

Amnesia: The Bunker is without a doubt the most frightening horror game I've played this decade. Its terrifying tale of being chased through a crumbling French bunker by a monster has the darkest, thickest, most unnerving atmosphere of any horror game I've played since Alien: Isolation. It's so intense that it's hard to imagine anyone making something light and airy out of its subterranean warrens, and it's downright inconceivable that someone might, say, turn Amnesia: The Bunker into Mirror's Edge.

And yet, that's exactly what modder TiMan has done. Created for Frictional Games' 2026 modding jam—which ran with the theme of 'What is reality?'—Bunker's Edge sees the base game's protagonist Henri transported through a portal from the trenches of war-ravaged France to the pristine skyline of EA's free-running classic.

The change of scenery alone is remarkable. The Bunker's HPL engine is purpose built to deliver darkness, shadows and murk, so seeing it handle such a bright and colourful environment is mightily impressive. But what's really interesting is how TiMan has implemented all of Mirror's Edge's free-running mechanics. Mantling, sliding, wall-running, pipe-climbing, runner's vision, that 180-degree wall-jump that I always struggled to perform in the base game, it's all here.

Despite the breezier setting, Bunker's Edge is still a horror game. The Bunker's monster has followed Henri through the portal, and chases him across the rooftops just as relentlessly as it stalks him through the base game's subterranean fortification.

All told, it's a snazzy bit of modding showmanship, though there are a couple of points to be aware of. First off, Bunker's Edge is (very understandably) not as slick as actual Mirror's Edge. Some of Henri's parkour moves, like sliding, are a little awkward, and more than once I clambered straight through a wall and found myself trapped inside the world geometry.

The other thing to note is that Bunker's Edge is very short. You can blast through the whole thing in about 15 minutes. The ending is also extremely weird, not what you'd expect from either The Bunker or Mirror's Edge.

Nonetheless, Bunker's Edge is a fun diversion for a Sunday afternoon. Alongside hosting modding jams, Frictional is also working on its next horror game Ontos. The sci-fi adventure has more in common with 2015's Soma than The Bunker, but it's still one of my most anticipated games of 2027.

Resident Evil is one of those series which rewards nosey players. There's always notes, recordings, and pictures hidden in the cracks and crevices, all of which give players more info. Whether that be the structural integrity, of Mr. X's trench coat or the fact that Grace Ashcroft has absolutely zero social life.

But it's not just all about notes—there's also a great deal of information given in Resident Evil games via their seemingly throwaway voice lines. So, with that in mind, one leaker has just found the motherlode.

Notable community modder Keff0 has posted two videos to YouTube over the last week. One goes through over 600 cut voice lines from the Resident Evil 4 remake, and the other explores nearly 400 cut voice lines from Resident Evil Requiem.

The Resident Evil 4 remake deep dive into the scrapped voice lines is certainly interesting, as we hear more from Leon, Ashley, Luis, and the Merchant. Hearing more from Leon is always a win, but the prize for 'most notable cut voice' line has to go to the Merchant, as he sneaks in a reference to Resident Evil Village.

"Ah, I see you're no stranger to villages," the Merchant says in a cut line from the RE4 remake. "The Duke? Lad shows promise." This is likely referring to The Duke from Resident Evil Village, who acts as the resident merchant and something of a guide to Ethan Winters.

Funny thing is, The Duke has also mentioned RE4's Merchant before, saying "What're ya buyin?" to Ethan before joking that it was "just something an old friend of mine used to say."

Both characters are also similar in that they seem omnipresent, omniscient, and unkillable, popping up at random across the map unscathed and knowing far more about what's going on than they perhaps should. Although the Merchant may not be as immortal as he once seemed, as Keff0 also uncovered unused animations for their death scene, suggesting that at one point during development players were able to kill him.

The cut voice lines for Requiem may not hold any connections to different Resident Evil games, but they do have masses of information about its characters and, crucially, the infected.

We already knew that the strain of the T-virus in Requiem was slightly different, in that it allowed infected to retain some memories of their past life and repeat some familiar actions like scrubbing the floors, eating, or singing. If you listened closely as well you could also hear the infected crying and asking for forgiveness.

But thanks to the cut voice lines found by Keff0, we now know that it could've been so much worse. Burning zombies would beg for water while screaming about how much the flames hurt. The huge Chunk would plead that he didn't want to die and cry about how stressed he was. Some infected would even thank you once you put them out of their misery.

The lines we did get were certainly enough to hammer home just how tragic it all was. But I can't help but feel a little sad that we missed out on some of these. I think I would've actually felt sorry for Chunk had I heard him whining about how stressed he was—it's certainly relatable.

Then there's Leon's cut lines. Most of them are just his usual grunts and groans along with some spider-themed quips—there's so many spider quips. But the most interesting line comes towards the end of the game, when he's really starting to suffer the effects of his infection and multiple monstrous fights: "I promise I'll make it home."

It may not seem like a lot. But given how sombre Leon's been ever since Resident Evil 2, it's actually quite significant that Leon came back to Raccoon City not as some hail mary mission to save Sherry and redeem his previous shortcomings, but with the intention of moving on and living his life away from its shadow.

Sadly, we were never going to be able to have all of these lines in Requiem or the Resident Evil 4 remake—there simply isn't the space to fit them all in. But at least we got to see what could have been.

If you've seen any slasher flick, you know the drill: every youth is horny, and the horny must die. Despite Halloween not being quite as trope-riddled as some of its stabbiest contemporaries, its recent asymmetrical PvP adaptation did include a minigame where two players could slip into a closet and bang each other for buffs—but after only a few days in a deluxe edition-exclusive early access, the feature has reportedly been removed.

In fact, it seems to have been silently hotfixed out. The most recent patch notes make no mention of the sex minigame, but the comments sure do. On the Steam thread, one user commented "ADD BACK THE CLOSET MINIGAME" five times in a row. Others have noted that Lynda, a flirty playable civilian who previously got extra benefits from the sex minigame, has had that trait removed, which I can confirm with a quick launch of the game.

Players on social media are not pleased, as you might imagine. "Lame as hell," wrote Choice-Scholar-2297 on Reddit. A thread on the game's subreddit titled "Please add back sex mini game" is quickly gaining traction; freetheree's original post reads, "Why did they remove it!??!?!?!? Me and my homeboy just wanna have sex in a closet? And we can’t???? Tf??????"

Lots of the sorts of jokes you might expect are being thrown around, and of course, it is hilarious that if this change sticks the game will have had closet sex as an exclusive time-limited pre-order bonus. Unfortunately, there might be a good reason for its removal.

You see, players are also speculating about the reason this might have been changed: dead players can respawn as older characters, such as a police officer or Michael Myers' therapist Dr. Loomis. Fine on its own, disturbing when those characters can potentially solicit sex from a high schooler—Laurie Strode, for instance, is only 17 years old in the version this game depicts. While Illfonic has not confirmed this is why the feature was patched out, I struggle to imagine a more convincing reason.

I've reached out to Illfonic for comment on the patch, and this story will be updated if I hear back.

I was largely nonplussed by Gamescom's Opening Night Live, particularly its relentless barrage of identikit fantasy action games that I struggled to tell apart. But one game stood out like a rat-powered computer in an elven glade, and that was Ontos, Frictional Games' latest horror adventure/existential crisis generator.

The Gamescom trailer was a barrage of unsettling, distinctive imagery, from rodent server-racks to slack-jawed dudes with electrodes protruding from their heads. I was instantly intrigued and keen to learn more, so I was delighted to discover that Frictional graced us with a longer look at Ontos in action.

The 10-minute showcase focuses on the same part of the game as the shorter trailer. But it adds significant context to how Ontos plays and the kinds of challenges you'll be dealing with. It starts with the player character—a woman named Aditi—arriving at the hospital wing of Ontos' repurposed 'Moon Hotel' Samsara via an internal railway system, before exploring the wing and unpicking an experiment run by a scientist called Crombie.

In moment-to-moment play, Ontos shares a lot in common with most of Frictional's other games (the exception being Amnesia: The Bunker, which is more of a proto immersive sim). There's a lot of tactile environment interaction, poking around computers for text logs, and a grisly sequence where Aditi plucks some electrodes out of a live rat's exposed brain. On top of this is a sprinkling of stealth, as Aditi evades a security camera by throwing a box across the room. Interestingly, the camera tracks the box's movement as it arcs through the air, which I'm sure must have featured in another game up to now. But I cannot recall an example of it.

Eventually, Aditi arrives at Crombie's experiment, which involves the rat server-rack seen in the Gamescom trailer. Crombie, speaking through the rat server, says he tried to create a copy of his personality to be stored in the rat RAM, but accidentally uploaded his consciousness from his own body, which sits slumped on a chair in the same room in a near-vegetative state. He then asks Aditi to help him return his consciousness to his body. It's a reasonable request, provided the voice in the rat computer really does belong to the original Crombie.

Such philosophical dilemmas were exactly what made SOMA such a brilliant and unusual horror game, and the showcase has convinced me that Ontos' spin on these more intellectual scares will be worth investigating the very least. The only thing I'm not totally sold on is Aditi's voice acting, which to me sounds a bit too chipper for someone confronted with such traumatic, reality-defying imagery.

In any case, 2027 can't come soon enough. Yet while Ontos was my favourite game shown at ONL, I wasn't quite the only thing that piqued my interest. Alien Isolation 2 seems to be shaping up to be a worthy successor to the original, as Joshua Wolens discovered in his hands-on demo. And naturally I'm up for one last adventure as Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past, which Joshua also saw in action in Cologne last month.

Silent Hill has gone international. Last year we went to Japan in Silent Hill f, and now the series is off to Scotland in Silent Hill: Townfall. As a middle-aged Scot who still remembers the '90s, when Townfall takes place, I was simultaneously nervous and excited about the rare opportunity to play a game that's so close to home.

What a relief, then, that Townfall not only feels incredibly Scottish, its Scottishness also perfectly matches Silent Hill's brand of unsettling psychological horror. And it's not such an unlikely pairing. Scotland is a brilliant fit for this kind of game—and I'm going to spend the next 2,000 or so words convincing you why.

It helps, of course, that the studio is both local and knows its way around the genre. Glaswegian developer Screen Burn has been serving up frights and mysteries since 2015, namely through Stories Untold and Observation. You might know it better by its former name, No Code. Co-founder and Townfall game director Jon McKellan also worked on Alien: Isolation prior to starting up the studio.

Welcome to St. Amelia

"We wanted St. Amelia to feel like a real place," McKellan tells me. "And I think, as with most writing, you write what you know, and it made sense for us to dig deep into our upbringings, into our past, and try and build a place that felt believable. To make the player care about this place, you need it to be believable.

Walking the streets of St. Amelia is an eerie experience because it all feels so familiar. There are still so many towns in Scotland that look like this—that mix of old fashioned architecture, cosy little shops and tiny fishing vessels sitting next to modern medical clinics and parked cars. The odd new flourishes squeezing into old spaces.

Outside a shop I notice a pair of charity boxes—one in the shape of a guide dog, another a swirly wishing well that looks like a helter skelter—that nearly everyone from the UK will recognise, not just Scots. These tiny bits of window dressing make the fictional town feel like a tangible place. I have absolutely been here before, even though I definitely haven't.

"A lot of it was going back through our old memories and trying to find things that we remembered, finding old photographs," says McKellan. "But also some genius out there had scanned every Argos catalogue for the last 30 years, and we were like looking at them and finding out, OK, if we need a TV in '90s, let's look at the catalogue from the '90s and find out which one would be more appropriate."

If you want a dose of '90s shopping nostalgia, here's an Argos catalogue from 1990. Enjoy looking at decades-old lawnmowers and kitchen utensils!

Being set in the '90s also means that technology can't really save you. You don't have a miraculous smart phone in your hands, and satnav was still very new. All you have is your CRTV, a chunky portable TV—just like the one I had as a teen—that picks up fuzzy signals, which you can use to solve puzzles and see where enemies are.

"They're kind of frail, they're unreliable," says McKellan. "I think all of that speaks really well to horror because you get these tools and they help you, but they're never going to be good enough to get you out of a jam. Relying on the analogue, it allows you to play within those limitations, which work well with horror. I think aesthetically as well, it adds texture, even just to the real-world tactile interfaces that feel just a little bit more grounded. Anything we can do to make the player feel like they're there is going to help with horror."

Weather alert

It wouldn't be an accurate portrayal of Scotland without our horrible weather, of course, which turns what would otherwise seem like an attractive, inviting town into a dour, dreich place. It's foggy and grey, the Scottish default. Normally, though, that would seem quite welcoming to me. Us Scots are a weird bunch and we're abnormally proud of our shite weather.

It's not just because we're pessimists revelling in misery (well, not entirely); there's actually a streak of optimism in the Scottish psyche, with so much Scottish art being about finding beauty in stark, gloomy places. Some of that art is even in my living room, where I've got a trio of prints depicting one of my favourite locations, the gorgeous island of Arran—presented as a jet-black rock—surrounded by a storm.

At a most basic level, it's just nice to be in your cosy home looking out the window at the rain pishing down or the fog rolling in. And Townfall preserves this. While there are plenty of horrors hidden in the buildings, the streets appear to be a lot more deadly, with the mist hiding horrors drawn from Simon—the protagonist—and St. Amelia's trauma. It feels safer indoors.

When Scotland is presented in videogames, it's usually a brief aside or approaching parody—all kilts and whisky and golf, with accents that call to mind fantasy dwarves. Townfall is more confident in its Scottishness—it doesn't need to scream about it at the top of its lungs. It's an understated familiarity, which lends it a more potent air of authenticity.

In the '90s, most of the world's experience of Scotland came through two movies: Braveheart and Trainspotting. Unsurprisingly, a Hollywood production featuring an Australian nutcase didn't quite capture the country. Trainspotting certainly did, though. It reflected the less palatable side of Scotland, the one the tourists rarely get to see: the squalor, the addiction, the depression and urban decay.

Townfall is much closer to Trainspotting than Braveheart, but rather than urban poverty and heroin addiction, it explores themes like medical trauma, the evisceration of small communities and the social impact of Margaret Thatcher's rule—one of Scotland's most loathed villains, right up there with King Edward I of England, the man also known as the Hammer of the Scots.

Trauma team

"The medical trauma is something that Simon's clearly involved with," says McKellan. "Without going into too much detail, I think again you kind of write what you know, and a lot of the experiences that Simon and the characters have have come from a real place and come from something that's pretty authentic in terms of how we cope with those things. So it also felt Silent Hill. It felt like the kind of story you would expect in a series like Silent Hill, without copying anything that's come before."

The way this is presented is extremely harrowing. In one early scene, we see a character Simon knows standing in the town square, when a huge tube suspended from the sky appears and plugs into his mouth. There's a hint of cosmic horror in the scene—tentacles dangling from the heavens—but also grounded psychological horror, that traumatic experience of being hooked up to medical equipment with feeding tubes pumping their contents into your stomach. It's nauseating.

"I think relatability is a big thing in horror," says McKellan. "The more you can relate to a problem, the more you can understand it. The more you can be frightened of it. The more you can be affected by it. And I think some of the themes and issues that we dive into in Townfall, some of them even very subtly in the background, I think a lot of people connect with it and have a stance on it, have an opinion on it. Like say the time period, the setting—it's all really relevant, and it creates a perfect storm for what has happened in St. Amelia that I think a lot of us could relate to, whether you're from Scotland or not."

But what actually happened in St. Amelia?

Townfall's introduction only provides hints. A company is referenced. There are protest signs scattered around the town square. Tension permeates everything. This is a town that has been through some shit—like so many Scottish towns of the era.

"I won't spoil what happened in St. Amelia and the journey that you'll go on there," says McKellan, "but there's a lot of imagery from those eras, growing up in the '90s and the era of Thatcher, things like that. It was a very tense climate at times, and I think there was a lot to draw from them for inspiration in terms of how it would look and feel for a town to be angry about something, and how it feels to protest."

The protest signs I see are real, as in Screen Burn actually made physical protest signs, scanned them and added them to the game, "to make sure it felt like this is what it would look like". The studio didn't simply want to make copies, it wanted to make the real deal, something authentic. Something that reflects "what life was like", even if the game isn't technically about what life was like—this is still Simon's story. And Simon is an outsider.

Stranger things

If you're a stranger to Scotland, you'll be fine in St. Amelia. While I can feel the Scottishness sweating out of Townfall's pores, it's often subtle, and knowing anything about Scotland is not a prerequisite. I've never visited Japan, but that doesn't stop me from getting something out of Silent Hill f, or being obsessed with Like A Dragon.

Simon is American. He is a visitor exploring an unfamiliar town. He's the perfect viewpoint for players—even if you are Scottish. The town, initially, is an enigma. We don't know what happened here or what's going on. We need to unravel the mystery.

"We wanted the player and Simon to be kind of in lockstep," says McKellan. "I didn't like the idea that Simon would come to the town but know his way around, or have amnesia and not know where things are. It made more sense that both Simon and the player see this for the first time. So all the discoveries that you make, Simon makes too, and that keeps you more more connected with Simon throughout the story."

The first-person perspective really emphasises this. I don't know about you lot, but third-person horror isn't nearly as thrilling and stressful to me. It's more like watching a film, and while I love horror films, it's rare for them to actually succeed in making me scared. Videogames have an advantage in that you're participating in the horror, but if you're inundated with UI elements and seeing your character at all times, it sheds a lot of the uncomfortable intimacy. When you're seeing through your character's eyes, however, it's a lot more effective.

"It gives us a kind of intimacy with the environment that is hard to do in third-person," says McKellan. "With the environments we've got, because we're in first-person, we didn't have to scale everything up. We didn't have to make the doors wider to let the camera through with you. We could keep everything to the right scale and make it feel quite dense and claustrophobic. So in terms of the horror, it's really helpful. It gets you close to the horror. There's no one in between you and the thing in front of you."

McKellan also notes that it really helps with the storytelling, too, "letting you explore that town and feel like you're really digging through people's cupboards and understanding where they lived". It bestows St. Amelia with a stronger sense of place, which feels essential in a game where the setting is so critical and looms so large.

I can't imagine using the CRTV in third-person, it would feel so clunky, and that was a big consideration for Screen Burn as well. "You just can't do that kind of mechanic from a camera far away without relying on UI overlays and making it feel almost sci-fi," says McKellan. "So we felt like doing it diegetically in your hand was a must-have."

I played Townfall in a well-lit, hot room surrounded by other journalists as a fan blew directly in my face. There probably isn't a worse way to experience a horror game. But I was genuinely entranced. St. Amelia's thick, thick atmosphere, the obsessive attention to detail, the juxtaposition of the familiar and the horrifying—I was no longer an exhausted journalist trying to get through another Gamescom appointment, I was living through a horror story in my own backyard. And it was awesome.

Silent Hill: Townfall launches on September 24.

It's like seeing an old friend: the clanking in the vents over your head, the way the ribbed tail passes over objects with a thunk-ka-thunk-ka-thunk-ka-thunk, the head-within-a-head, the screaming. You are here, you are back, you have been impaled through the abdomen and killed.

I have played perhaps 20 minutes of Alien: Isolation 2 at Gamescom 2026 and I can tell you this: it is certainly Alien: Isolation. There are some new wrinkles, though—where the first game was a strictly inside affair, stranding you on the space station Sevastopol, the second game sets you down planetside in an entirely new character's shoes. Fewer air vents, fewer vital systems shuddering to a halt; a lot more weather, a lot more space.

You are Blake. Here are the two things to know about Blake: she is not Amanda Ripley—the first game's protagonist who did not feature at all in my time with Alien: Isolation 2—but she is Weyland-Yutani. Specifically, she's Weyland-Yutani management, and isn't that interesting? You're no working class hero. You're now in the shoes of a character who, in any Alien movie worth its salt, would likely reveal themselves as a villain and end up decapitated about 70% of the way through the film.

Planetside, too

The demo Sega and Creative Assembly put together for Gamescom was a little odd. It consisted of (what I must assume are) the game's opening scenes. Blake and a couple of Weyland-Yutani flunkies are on the surface of a planet and checking out a crash site. In practice, this divides the demo into two: the part where you're wandering outside and the bit where you've penetrated the crashed ship.

Why is this weird? Because the crashed ship was, quite literally, an area from the first Alien: Isolation—one of the units Ripley jettisoned from the Sevastopol in her adventures on the cursed station. It's also the only part of the demo that actually featured the xenomorph. That means I never got a chance to experience the alien in the new, outdoor environments, only in one I had already played before.

I'm happy to predict that being pursued by the xenomorph outside is going to feature whole new dimensions of stress and disorientation over the previous game. In their search for the crash site, Blake and co have to deal with a rising storm on the planet's surface. Rain builds and wind roars, cutting off your senses as you try to navigate the map. I found it stressful, and I wasn't even being chased by a monster at that point.

"You can be in an exterior, and you have the wind and it's really strong, and you throw a flare and it just flies back in your face," says Ana Sopikova, the game's art director, as she describes the new threats you face in the outside world. "What do you do now, right? Or the rain starts and it's really loud and you can't hear the alien's footsteps. So it's basically taken everything that people love, but just adding new layers on top of it… with everything being unscripted, it just creates much more depth in the experience."

Hello, you

After a lot of time getting rained on and lost, I made my way into the crashed ship, and the xenomorph wasted absolutely no time in oozing out of an overhead vent.

All the old fear hormones kicked in. By the end of my time with the first Alien: Isolation, the xenomorph had lost all terror for me. It was just a game mechanic—an obstacle like any other to be circumvented and handled. I guess that immunity wore off, because sneaking about the wreckage of this ship as the alien clanked about over, under, and beside me had my heart rate spiking.

Creative Assembly's still up to its old tricks. The studio makes ample use of Alien's analogue, mechanical world to force you to zoom in on cranks, valves, computer screens, and save points in ways that kneecap your awareness of the room around you and send your imagination into overdrive. It worked in the first game. It works here.

But it was all quite familiar. Without being able to take the alien outside, my experience of dodging it in the new Isolation felt much like it did in the old one. A lot of throwing objects to distract it, ducking under desks, and fervently praying that it wouldn't turn to walk down the path that would lead it directly to me. All good fun, but I'm ready to see how the xenomorph handles touching grass.

To hear Creative Assembly tell it, heading planetside will change the game when it comes time for Alien: Isolation 2's release. "In the first game, and in the sequel as well, [the alien] learns and it adapts," says Sopikova. "This is something that we're putting a lot of focus on, because we don't want the player to just pick their favorite tool and keep using it… And obviously, now with more elements, with exteriors, with the weather, with more variables at play, we can really expand on that depth of how the alien learns. What exactly does it learn about you? How does it affect the way it hunts, and how does it affect you ultimately?" Well, I'm eager to find out.

Something's wrong with me. No matter how many horror games I play, I just can't get scared like I used to. Perhaps I'm the problem—maybe a decade of playing horror games pretty much non-stop has irrevocably altered my brain chemistry.

Take Resident Evil Requiem, for example—that just doesn't make the cut for a horror game in my book. Apart from the first five minutes in the underground cells, there just wasn't anything that felt particularly scary. In fact, I don't believe that any horror game that gives me a gun can be scary, except for Amnesia: The Bunker—I genuinely thought that game was going to kill me.

Again, I find myself thinking that there's something up with my nervous system, because even Hideki Kamiya, director of Resident Evil 2, would disagree with me. He believes that Capcom has become blind to just how scary its recent games have become.

"I've never been a fan of horror. I mean, even from the time I was young, I could never handle it," Kamiya says in an interview with VGC. "I don’t like horror, and I don’t like scary things. I'm not able to make it through scary movies, and that was even the case back in the day.

"But nowadays, with how photorealistic and high-fidelity video games have gotten, the amount of crazy, horrifying things that people are able to put on the screen is absolutely insane, and I think anybody who's on the Resident Evil teams at Capcom, at this point, they must all be completely numb to how scary the thing they’re making is."

Kamiya has previously pitched a cutesy Resident Evil game, complete with Leon fishing in the countryside, foraging for wild veggies, baking bread, and walking his dog. It's either that or Capcom adding a "not scary mode" for its games, "where the zombies get all cute, the blood splatters turn into cherry blossom petals, the music becomes this upbeat, feel-good kind of tune, and you can just purely enjoy the puzzles and battles in a fun mood."

I do find it quite difficult pitching Resident Evil and others like it to my friends who won't touch horror games with a barge pole. It does seem a shame that these fantastic stories and characters are locked behind the requirement of a broken amygdala.

"Just recently this year we had Resident Evil Requiem and the big return of Leon Kennedy, and he went back to Raccoon City, and he's reliving all of those memories and all of those experiences," Kamiya says. "As somebody who directed that original game, Resident Evil 2, I was curious to know how that panned out for him. I wanted to experience that myself as a player, but the game was way too scary, and I couldn't."

Now that's a shame. Maybe Capcom has gone awry if even the director of one of, if not the, most iconic Resident Evil games is barred from accessing its recent games. "I legitimately wished it would include some kind of non-horror mode for people like me," Kamiya adds. "I talk to folks who are on the Resident Evil teams at Capcom just privately, and I tell them that their games are way too scary, and they're like, 'what, come on, they’re not that scary'. They seriously seem to have no awareness of how scary the things they make actually are, so I really hope they address that at some point."

While I do think adding a softer mode that could make the games accessible to more people may be fun, like The Dark Pictures Anthology's cinematic mode, I don't want Capcom to pull its horror punches. I actually want Capcom to go to the other extreme and experiment with more Resident Evil 7-likes which are suffocatingly terrifying. But maybe there's something wrong with me.

Secret Neighbor, the multiplayer spinoff for the 2017 horror game Hello Neighbor, has been temporarily taken offline following a security breach by a hacker who accessed the game's backend systems and deleted player data.

The incident, which occurred last week, involved an individual who obtained credentials with admin access to the game. The hacker then proceeded to wipe player profiles, in-game progression, and other data, while also carrying out what developer Hologryph and publisher tinyBuild described as a "coordinated attack on our server systems and infrastructure" across all platforms.

Hologryph and tinyBuild addressed the situation in a Steam post, (via delistedgames). They explained that, in addition to the attack, the hacker had "stated they intend to continue targeting the game and its backend systems until the game is removed from sale across all platforms."

According to both companies, no personal data or information had been compromised by the attack. Yet as the incident is ongoing, they have opted to "temporarily shut down the game until we had addressed the breach and closed any vulnerabilities that may have led to the incident."

In its statement, Hologryph and tinyBuild say they have alerted the relevant authorities to the situation. They are also working with PlayFab—the company which provides Secret Neighbour's backend services—in an attempt to recover the data that has been wiped.

As for when the issue is likely to be resolved, no timeframe has been provided. But Secret Neighbor remains on Steam and available to purchase. But Hologryph and tinyBuild say they will keep players updated "on our progress and how the situation unfolds going forwards."

Secret Neighbor released back in 2019. The following year, tinyBuild invested $3 million into Hologryph, becoming a majority stakeholder in the company having acquired the original Hello Neighbour's developer, Dynamic Pixels, a few months prior.

A sequel to Hello Neighbor was released in 2022, and a third game is apparently in development. The original Hello Neighbor is still going strong, too, having received its highest peak concurrent player-count in March this year.

Too much of a good thing, believe it or not, can be bad, even when that thing is Silent Hill. Especially when faced with the prospect of a new game every year, though franchise producer Motoi Okamoto has tried to reassure us that it's totally a good thing.

"Our aim is to, hopefully, have an annual release of new games," Okamoto says in an interview with GamesRadar at Gamescom 2026. "We would like to let players know that we have more experiences coming up, and many types of games that, we believe, will be able to provide positive kinds of surprises for players waiting for this for the series."

Silent Hill f was perhaps the most pleasant gaming surprise I've had in a long time. My expectations weren't exactly low for the game, but I was still apprehensive to see whether Konami and NeoBards could pull off a Silent Hill game which left behind the foggy American mountain town and did something different. But as you can probably tell from my glowing Silent Hill f review, they managed to pull it off.

They did such a great job, in fact, that it single-handedly made me excited for future games to take the curse of Silent Hill to new locations. So why am I so apprehensive about the idea of a new Silent Hill every year? Well, because I also used to play Call of Duty.

What scares me most about an annual release is the pressure both development studios and devs at Konami may face to keep up. Silent Hill isn't exactly an easy formula to replicate, yes its atmosphere and vibes are distinctive, but it takes more than a bit of fog to pull it off. The key is having a story which is traumatic, believable, and substantial enough to not only justify the fog descending on the protagonist, but to also keep players interested.

Okamoto does at least understand the need for keeping the series fresh with new ideas, however. "If we stay laser-focused on the same American setting, that would exhaust [narrative] possibilities, and also potentially cause fatigue for the playerbase," he adds.

While teams need to "work within the types of environments and the types of storytelling that works best for them" they also need to push the boat out, creating new circumstances which justify new games. I never want to finish a new Silent Hill game and think to myself: 'I should've just replayed Silent Hill 2'. Hopefully, it never comes to that.

As a former employee of Playtime Co., you've explored the depths of its horrifying toy factory and met many of its inhabitants, including Huggy Wuggy, who just wants to hug you (to death).

Today Mob Entertainment, makers of Poppy Playtime, have announced a new game, and it's sending you back to that haunted toy factory once more—but this time you can bring some friends along. Escape from Playtime is a co-op horror game for 1-4 players and it's coming to early access on Steam. Here's the announcement trailer:

This time around you're playing "from the perspective of the cute-yet-disturbing Smiling Critters," says Mob Entertainment—the Critters being the misfit toys you meet in the original episodic (and singleplayer) Poppy Playtime.

"Tasked with scavenging materials for a mysterious building project that promises escape from the factory, players will need to work together and follow instructions from an ominous voice lurking somewhere in the shadows, all while evading the factory's most dangerous denizens," the developer says.

"Along the way, players can solve puzzles, uncover clues, scavenge tools, use hiding spots and alternate routes, and turn the factory layout to their advantage. Proximity voice chat adds another risk: communication is essential, but an irresponsible whisper can bring the mission to a brutal end."

Fans of the original horror series will see some familiar sights in the factory, but just because you've been there before doesn't mean there won't be a few surprises: "The mysterious Voice seems to be altering the factory's layout, creating procedurally generated environments that change with each run," says Mob Entertainment.

Well, a spooky factory full of mechanical horrors sounds like a great fit for co-op, so I'm not surprised Mob decided to make their next survival horror game a multiplayer experience. There's no date shown in the trailer, just that Escape from Playtime is "coming soon" to early access. Here's its home on Steam while you wait.

Good news from the near future: Space travel has apparently advanced enough to allow humanity to establish a hotel on the surface of the moon.

Bad news: The RAMpocalypse apparently continues unabated, forcing novel experimentation with alternate forms of computer memory not rendered wholly unaffordable by AI datacenters. Namely, rat computers.

This believable projection of the current miserable state of consumer hardware comes courtesy of Ontos, the next game from Amnesia developer Frictional Games. In the trailer above, a man strapped to a chair with electrodes stuck in his head is a bit freaky, though less so than another guy who's missing everything from his upper teeth down; perhaps humanity in the future is so desperate for localized processing power that we're resorting to shoving DisplayPort cables into our brains, too.

The strongest big of imagery in the trailer by far, though, is a computer the size of a wall with 60 rats connected to it in sequence. Or parallel? I'm not great on my circuitry fundamentals, but I know a rat computer when I see one.

I am instinctively scared of the rat computer and the unknown potential of 60 rat minds taking the place of random access asiago memory.

My fear is apparently warranted, given the ominous question posed in the trailer's YouTube description is as follows:

"Do you follow the instructions given through the rodent machine?

Do you seek an alternative approach?

Or simply sabotage the experiment to satisfy your own morbid curiosity?"

The description claims there is "no right or wrong solution in Ontos," but I think the subtext is clear: We must do whatever possible to avoid this future coming to pass. Let's call off this whole AI thing before the next hardware generation arrives, lest Dire Digital Rattus 6 become the only memory accepted by motherboards by the year 2030.

Assuming we even have that much time. Ontos is out next year, and might be a banger; we loved Frictional's last game, Amnesia: The Bunker, scoring it a 93%.

If there's one thing I know about the upcoming Resident Evil film it's that the director Zach Cregger is doing the utmost to stay true to the series' roots. "I happen to worship these Resident Evil games and pull a lot of inspiration from the experience of playing them," Cregger reminds fans in a recent interview with DiscussingFilm.

I've already explained why this means he knows ball. But authenticity is a moving target for a series which just turned 30 years old, and has made some pretty monumental changes over the last three decades. Exactly what Cregger chooses to remain true to isn't as clear cut as some may think.

One example of this can be found in the latest teaser for the film, which shows a first-person camera angle of Bryan creeping through corridors and shooting down some speedy infected. An OG Resident Evil fan could faint at the sight of this, as traditionally, a third-person or fixed perspective were what you would see in a Resident Evil game. But this isn't the late 90s anymore, in fact, Resident Evil hasn't had an new exclusively third person perspective for almost a decade now.

Apart from that little hiccup at the start of 2000, 2017 was the first time Resident Evil scrapped the third person perspective with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, with Capcom opting for a first-person perspective instead.

It was initially met with a negative knee-jerk reaction as players (myself included) feared that Resident Evil was about to be taken down a gimmicky FPS road, but we were wrong, and Biohazard managed to pull it off so well that first-person has now become a staple for the series with Resident Evil 8: Village and Requiem having both first and third person options. And dare I say, first-person suits Village better.

"This is an opportunity for me to be loyal to the games in spirit and in tone, and build a story that just puts you in that scenario again, and again, and again, with increasing stakes," Cregger adds, again reminding players that this adaptation isn't meant to be a 1:1 shot recreation of any of the games, but instead an amalgamation of ideas, traits, and vibes that the games employ.

In the same way, Cregger has explained that he's tried to recreate the game's progression by keeping "the environment changing every seven or eight minutes" always pushing the protagonist forward as if he's "moving onto another level." This is also helped by the fact that Bryan will move through weapons much like a protagonist in one of the games would: "You start with a pistol, and then you graduate to a shotgun, and then you graduate to a machine gun."

In the grand scheme of things, camera perspectives will play a small part in how successful the film is. But all these little nods to the games combined will serve as a solid foundation if Cregger manages to pull it all off, which I really hope he does.

1998 was a vintage year for PC gaming: Half-Life, Unreal, StarCraft, Thief and Baldur's Gate all released in lavish oversize retail boxes, and it was just as busy in console land: Ocarina of Time and Banjo-Kazooie released on Nintendo 64, while the original PlayStation enjoyed Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil 2.

Into this crowd of future classics was also Sanitarium, which shuffled onto shelves, probably sheepishly, in April 1998. It's an isometric point-and-click adventure starring Max, an amnesiac who wakes in a bizarre, rundown sanitarium. Lest you think this is a game about exploring a slightly eerie rundown hospital, let me disabuse you of that notion immediately: For fear of spoiling everything, I can only say: this game goes places.

Richard Cobbett wrote about Sanitarium in his Crapshoot column, and Alexis Ong even went as far as to track down its creators. If you've played Sanitarium—especially divorced from its mid '90s context—you're probably evangelical about it. It carefully balances the line between camp and psychologically gruelling, but questions of tone aside, it's a gorgeously vivid and varied thing, with beautifully rendered isometric environments.

I bought Sanitarium for a couple of bucks on Steam a while ago, but it turns out there's yet another version of Sanitarium coming, also published by Ziggurat. Sanitarium Enhanced is a new reissue with a range of fairly light-of-touch tweaks and additions including widescreen support during gameplay (not just during cutscenes), controller support, and an extras gallery including behind-the-scenes and cut content.

Perhaps most importantly, a new optional hint mode has been added, which should make this quintessentially '90s point-and-clicker much more palatable to modern players who don't want to waste hours systematically clicking on things to check if they're interactive or not. A range of unspecified "legacy bugs and issues" have also been fixed.

Steam Deck optimizations are also included though I should point out that the old version of Sanitarium works just fine already using the trackpads. But, if you prefer to use face buttons and analog sticks soon that'll be much easier, by dint of this new version also arriving on Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox consoles. When? Some time later in 2026.

Good news everyone: we've got even more Silent Hill: Townfall to help fill the void until its release. But instead of a short story or teaser trailer, we have 18 minutes of poor old Simon Ordell wandering around the abandoned (and increasingly hostile) town of St. Amelia.

It's the first extended cut of playthrough we've seen for Townfall, and it did not disappoint. The vibes, setting, and grotesque monsters all seem on point for a Silent Hill game, with the small exception of the game's firearms.

I don't think Simon's handling of the revolver was particularly disastrous. But after enjoying Silent Hill f, which had no guns, seeing Simon execute monsters in seconds reminded me why I prefer good old-fashioned melee fights.

I like suffering in Silent Hill games. I like being pushed to my limits, being put in almost impossible situations, and having to get up close and personal with the disgusting things I find wandering around in the fog. While there are never usually a lot of guns to be found, I still think they give players an easy way out of combat that can ruin the tension and fear from being constantly on the backfoot.

I can only think of one horror game that manages to stay terrifying while also giving its protagonist access to a gun—Amnesia: The Bunker—and even then I felt infinitely more confident when I managed to scrounge up more ammo. That doesn't mean games can't still be stressful. There's few things worse than firing at an enemy which is getting closer, only to run out of bullets before you manage to down it, but it's a different kind of fear, one that I'm more used to seeing in series like Resident Evil rather than Silent Hill.

It'll also be interesting to see how Simon gets his hands on firearms in Townfall. While the game is set a year before the handgun ban, St. Amelia is still just a small town in Scotland, there won't just be a guns lying around in a random appartments—this isn't the U.S. Hopefully, there'll only be minimal firearms and more melee combat and stealth for players to torment themselves with.

Guns aside, the rest of the trailer looked very good. I try to not get my hopes up too high before I've played a game, but I am truly morbidly excited to explore the town of St. Amelia, especially after seeing its blood red fog and strangely nostalgic streets.

The Sinking City was exactly the kind of ambitious but flawed game that deserves a sequel. Good ideas, middling execution? Give 'em another shot, I'm sure they'll do better second time around. What was ambitious was that it was a detective game but also a horror game about H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos set in a flooded open world where sometimes you have to get around by motorboating, and not in the fun way.

Fine idea, but it suffered from the classic open world problem of not enough butter spread across too much toast, quickly repeating patterns that become so familiar they were robbed of mystery and spookiness, which are things you rather need in a horror game about a detective.

The Sinking City 2 wisely bins most of that, and is instead pretty much pure survival horror in a series of constrained locations. It's Resident Evil right down to puzzle locks and zombies who sometimes come back stronger after being shot, only set in the 1920s. Which is no bad thing. Resident Evil: Roaring '20s Revelations is a solid videogame pitch, and now we don't have to wait for Capcom to make it.

Arkham—the city from Lovecraft's stories, not the asylum where Batman locks up Condiment King—has flooded, which is a problem for many people, but notably for hat-wearing occult adventurer Calvin Rafferty. A brand new protagonist, the only references to the original Sinking City in this sequel being easter eggs, Cal's out to revive his partner in occult adventure and also life, Faye Bennett. She's in a supernatural coma after a trip to the Dreamlands.

By the time the game starts Arkham's evacuation is almost complete. It's just you and a handful of other weirdos who refuse to leave, still hanging around to discover that the worm-like creatures who showed up with the flood have started clambering inside corpses to puppet them with homicidal intent.

This sets the scene for act one, where you boat across Arkham in search of a ritual to wake Faye, dock at abandoned buildings to shoot zombies and other gribblies, solve arcane puzzles, and scrounge for supplies. The combat's improved, with an actual dodge move and enemies desperate to be baited into charging so you can sidestep then get in a cheeky melee to save ammo. I do wish it had that 180-turn button the RE games have, but it definitely feels snappier.

The problem with the original's stealth being janky has also been solved—by ditching it completely. Cal stands resolutely upright while shooting monsters made of arms because crouching's for wimps I guess. The sanity meter's gone too, which seems more of a loss, though the idea madness can be measured like hit points did run a bit counter to the themes.

Given that Frogwares was responsible for the Sherlock Holmes games, it's interesting to see how much the investigation side of things has also been downplayed. Though you still have a mind palace, it's mostly for linking clues that lead to combination-lock codes and other puzzle solutions rather than murder suspects. Cal may dress like a detective, and be knocked unconscious about as often as a noir private eye, but he doesn't do any actual detecting.

Another borrowing from RE is the inventory grid you have to make space in for weapons, consumables, quest objects (a key shaped like a fish takes up as much space as a handgun), and crafting items. More than once I left a larger gun in a safe room to make space, then immediately found multiple caches of ammo for that specific gun.

Or I'd accidentally fill the inventory with crafting guff and not have room for something I needed. It's a pain, and as in most games with crafting systems bolted on, the crafting doesn't add anything except literal filler. How about instead of finding healing herbs and chemicals then combining them to make medicine, I could just, y'know, find medicine?

After the first area you travel to a hospital, and a couple of other staple survival horror locations after that. To my surprise you never return to the flooded streets, never have a chance to clean up sidequests you skipped, never open additional places to explore or find out more about the NPCs you left behind. I expected to see more than a sliver of the Dreamlands too, but instead the whole story ends in a rush, and then you're back at the start for a New Game Plus that doesn't let you keep your inventory upgrades.

There's a decent survival horror game you can wrap in under 15 hours here, one I mostly enjoyed while I was playing it, even if the finale had me asking, "Is this it?" An improvement over the original then, if an incremental one. Maybe the third time'll be the charm.

We're some ways out from the release of Resident Evil's Code: Veronica remake, but that hasn't stopped me or the other 1,999,999 eager players from wishlisting the game as Capcom celebrates an impressive milestone.

"2 million biscuits for the 2 million of you who've wishlisted Resident Evil Veronica, thank you," an official social media post reads alongside an image of that innocent old lady who definitely isn't Mother Miranda in disguise, nothing to see here guys.

The hype around Veronica may seem a bit strange at first. Back in the day Code: Veronica sold fewer copies compared to other Resi releases of the time (although that's probably thanks to the Dreamcast). Even with its positive critical reception at the time, some fans have looked back at its tricky design choices more unfavourably as of late. But I love three things in my life, Resident Evil, Chris, and Claire, so I'm pretty sure I'll love the remake.

In all seriousness, Code: Veronica's story, vibes, and locations were all immaculate, and its iffy controls are something I have no doubt the devs will improve, especially considering their track record. Yoshiaki Hirabayashi is producer and Kazunori Kadoi and Yasuhiro Anpo are directing the remake, all three of them previously worked on the Resident Evil 2 remake and the Resident Evil 4 remake; two games I was so sure didn't need remaking.

But somehow they managed to do them justice and make some ingenious changes that really improved my experience. One such example was how the team managed to make Ashley go from the most annoying thing to ever grace my screen to a helpful and likable companion who actually exhibited some personal growth over the course of the Resident Evil 4 remake. For that, I am thankful.

With that kind of expertise on hand it comes as no surprise to me that Resident Evil fans are eager to wishlist Veronica, even with just an announcement trailer to go off.

Another week, another fun tidbit learned about our new favorite gamer turned movie star, Inde Navarrette, who creeped us all the hell out in the smash-hit horror film Obsession earlier this year.

We already marveled at Navarrette cooly streaming her Call of Duty killstreaks on Twitch while wearing a Toad hat, and we were charmed to hear she (in part) learned to build PCs by watching Henry Cavill do it on YouTube.

This latest revelation is encouraging, too: Navarrette is a big fan of Resident Evil. Hey, so are we! Celebrities: they're just like us.

In a video interview with Variety's Tiana DeNicola, Navarrette talked about the first videogames she ever played—her mom bought her Shrek: Super Party for PlayStation 2 and her dad was a big Call of Duty fan—as well as what games she's playing now, like God of War Ragnarök.

Navarrette is also playing horror games these days, which feels appropriate considering how spooky Obsession was, and says she's currently "on a Resident Evil kick."

DeNicola asked if Navarrette had been contacted by anyone to do any acting in a videogame.

"Yes, and I'm starting my journey with that soon," Navarrette said, and though she wouldn't reveal which game she would be acting in, it sounds like it could be an indie game rather than a triple-A blockbuster.

"I want to try something smaller to kind of test the waters," she said, "because videogames are obviously an interest of mine."

As for playing a part in a Resident Evil project: "I love that world specifically, the Resident Evil world," Navarrette said.

"That would be perfect for you," DeNicola said. "I think that would be amazing."

"I… would die inside," Navarrette said.

Oddly enough, Navarrette hadn't heard about Zach Cregger's Resident Evil film coming out next month, but seemed delighted at the idea.

"I will buy a ticket," Navarrette said. "That's exciting."

I have to agree with DeNicola, Navarrette would be a perfect fit for Resident Evil, either in a film or a game. Her performance in Obsession required both the type of heightened emotion and the extreme physicality that would be right at home in Raccoon City. Hopefully Capcom will make it happen someday. You can see Variety's entire interview on YouTube.

First reported by Automaton, Spanking Exorcist developer Actor made a free "apology game" available to download after missing a planned July 24 release date due to overzealous Steam content moderation. In the simple apology game, you press a button to simulate spanking the developer as punishment.

Spanking Exorcist's trailer shows a game combining first person exploration, unsettling, sex doll-looking lady characters, and slightly less scary, Sadako-looking forsaken waif lady characters. It strikes me as a perfectly adequate, replacement-level gag horror game for streamers to react to, if a bit more risque than your usual fare.

"I consent," you say. "I consent," announces the anonymous Japanese developer, Actor. "Isn't there someone you forgot to ask?" asserts Valve. The uneven content moderation on Steam became a big story following controversial intervention by payment processors and the persecution of horror game Horses, but it's always been odd.

I'm fond of the theory that there's just one particularly zealous prude at Valve who really has it out for horny stuff from Japan. Anyway, you can still buy Furry Hitler (one and two), as well as Alex Jones' shitty videogame on Steam.

I was pleased to discover that Plantation Simulator was taken down (by its developer's request, not Valve's intercession) following negative reporting by Kotaku. Spanking Exorcist is fine by comparison. Harmless. Let my boy spank.

"We sincerely apologize for the delay in the release of Spanking Exorcist on this occasion," Actor wrote on X, "The Everything App" (auto-translated from Japanese). "As a token of our remorse, we've created a game where you can spank the butt of the developer, Actor … We would be delighted if you enjoy it."

In the interest of journalistic integrity, I followed the Google Drive download link and procured Apology.exe to try it out for myself, ignoring the protests of Google Drive and Windows. Computer, disable safeties, activate indie Japanese gag spanking game. Yes, I know the risks (I'm currently running a system scan as I write this).

There is not much to Apology.exe, just a cartoonish representation of a derriere viewed from overhead and surrounded by Japanese text. There's a link to Spanking Exorcist's Steam page, a button to quit out, and a button to make the butt jiggle in tune with a slapping sound effect. It is the slightest of droll diversions you could sample in this beautiful life, but I appreciate the bit.

And the story gets a happy(?) ending too. I'm thrilled to report that Spanking Exorcist proper is available for download on Steam, having released just six days after its initial target date. It's six bucks usually, $5.39 on a launch sale, and I'm probably not gonna get it.

One of the most magical parts of Silent Hill f was that never in a hundred years did I think it would be something that Konami would greenlight. Not because it's outlandish or a poor idea, I absolutely loved it, but because I just thought Konami had kind of set aside doing anything new with the franchise.

But I was wrong, and I've never been happier to be wrong, because Silent Hill f was exactly the kind of shake up this series needed—adding new twists to what we've come to expect from these games while also holding its psychological horror roots from Silent Hill 2 sacred. And because of this we've had not one but two new games over the last couple of years come out with Silent Hill f and now Silent Hill: Townfall—we are truly spoilt.

As it turns out, releasing new Silent Hill games which stray from the original format and location were exactly what devs wanted to do when it came to planning the series' comeback.

Motoi Okamoto, executive producer, explained during a lecture at CEDEC 2026 (via 4Gamer and Automaton) that the team wanted to avoid doing a "wait and see remake," which essentially means a remake purely for the sake of gauging interest in an old series. Okamoto believed that "at best, only about half of the original users will return with a remake" and if the company wanted to encourage new and old players to check out their new games they'd need to offer more than just nostalgia. This is why Silent Hill 2's remake was announced alongside Silent Hill f and Townfall.

Luckily, like Capcom has found with its Resident Evil series, Konami has also discovered a good cadence with Silent Hill—offering remakes alongside new standalone titles, with Silent Hill 2 preceding Silent Hill f and a Silent Hill remake being in the works.

The secret to it all working? Well, Okamoto does applaud Konami's development partners such as Bloober Team, Annapurna, Screen Burn, and NeoBards for their excellent work and skills bringing new and old Silent Hill stories to life. But even more important than choosing solid partners is having a solid base to work with, and that's where Konami began again with Silent Hill.

Clarifying Silent Hill's identity was of the utmost importance when beginning its revitalisation. The core concept Okamoto chose was "psychological horror", having a protagonist confront their worries, conflicts, and guilt in an "inner world" alongside encountering symbolic projections of trauma—wandering around the world they found themselves in was a metaphor for the psychological process aka Silent Hill. This is why Konami chose to kick it all off with a Silent Hill 2 remake, a game that embodied all of these traits.

Everything that Okamoto discussed here is clear as day when you look at what Silent Hill has recently put out. There's a coherence, experimentation, and freshness to what Konami is doing with this much beloved series, and as a long time fan I couldn't be happier.

Capcom is on a roll. It had a successful year, what with the release of Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata, the latter of which sold 2.5 million copies in just three months. And part of this continued success is thanks to all the remakes Capcom has under its belt.

"One of the reasons for creating remakes is producing a new entry in the Resident Evil series every year would be quite an undertaking and a difficult task," producer Masachika Kawata says in an interview with GameInformer. "So, being able to revisit older games and remake them helps Capcom meet that goal of releasing a Resident Evil title each year, but it also allows the team to continually challenge themselves and hone their craft.

"That’s not to say the remakes are any less important. In fact, they’re just as important as the mainline titles. Capcom is lucky enough to have found this cycle that can continue to provide us with the financial resources to create things like new entries in the Resident Evil series and completely new IP like Pragmata. So there is that relationship there."

There's no kidding that Capcom is in a very fortunate situation, one that I'm sure plenty of other studios are jealous of. It has access to a great deal of much-loved older games, and has also managed to crack the code when it comes to remaking them. I was a little unsure of the Resident Evil 4 remake before it was released—RE4 is my favourite of the bunch, and I was uncertain how Capcom could improve on that kind of greatness. But RE4's remake ended up being a thoughtful and massively worthwhile venture.

This isn't to say, however, that I'd want to see back-to-back Resident Evil remakes. Capcom has already hit the big ones after cycling through RE4, RE2, and even RE3, with a dwindling supply of nostalgia left, and I would much rather see this universe be expanded on, not just reiterated into oblivion. In a perfect world, we'd be getting far more original stories than remakes, but the world is anything but perfect.

"Maybe there are a lot of people out there who would like to see more spinoff titles or such (yup, that's me!), but honestly, the team is giving everything it has right now, working on things like our new entries like Requiem or remakes," Kawata says, "So honestly, at the moment, that’s where our efforts [are] being focused. We are so focused on pouring our energy into that, I don’t think there’s a whole lot left right now for a spinoff."

It seems like DLC's of mainline games take priority, with a Resident Evil Requiem DLC being scheduled for next year and rumours of one for the Code: Veronica remake coming out the year after that. I would certainly like to see more new ideas coming from Capcom, but it's hard to argue against the fact that it's clearly found a rhythm with these remakes and new games.

But just because Capcom has found a comfortable cadence doesn't mean the devs plan on getting complacent. Kawata himself says that new games like Pragmata "are absolutely necessary" when it comes to honing the development team's skills with "new challenges or situations for a game in a triple-A series."

"Creating new things is not just absolutely necessary for the games industry," Kawata adds. "It’s absolutely necessary for the entire entertainment industry. If you’re not doing new things, you’re just going to be repeating old things. And while that’s not necessarily bad in itself, you’re never really going to move forward that way."

I feel a little bad about spoiling this, but the word is already out and besides, it's kind of my job: It looks like Frictional Games is working on a new version of its horror masterpiece Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and it might be out later this year.

Word of the update slipped out through Frictional's latest annual report, which was released in June but went unnoticed until redditor CarlZzZoneNnn (via Insider Gaming) got bored and started browsing through it. I dug into it myself, aided by Google Translate, and after some poking around I found what I was looking for here. (If you want to see it for yourself, scroll down the page and download "Bokslut 2025-12.")

After saying Frictional's focus has been on Ontos, the studio's next big horror game, it adds, "We also plan to release a new version of Amnesia: The Dark Descent in late 2026." That's the extent of it and it's not much to go on—Frictional may just be hammering away on a Switch 2 port, or maybe a Roblox edition or... whatever.

But maybe—maybe—we're all going to get to partake in some sort of updated Dark Descent good times: A remake, a remaster, or something that compels us to dive back into that magnificently horrific nightmare. Obviously that's what I'm hoping for.

Assuming that's the case (and I feel like its inclusion in an annual financial report suggests something more significant than just another platform port) it'll be interesting to see how Dark Descent holds up. Frictional's approach to horror has matured dramatically since then, and so has its audience, and that classic Amnesia gameplay isn't as novel now as it was then.

But there's just no overstating how impactful that game was: After building up to it through the Penumbra trilogy, Frictional absolutely knocked it out of the park with The Dark Descent, creating one of the most viscerally terrifying videogames of all time.

We said in our 88% review that Amnesia: The Dark Descent "understands that the imagined far outweighs the known in its psychological punch, and it gives you enough audio and visual cues to imagine a veritable carnival of horrors." But every now and then it delivered that carnival of horrors right in your face with both barrels, and you'd end up screaming and dancing and maybe breaking your headphones. It was not cool, but also extremely cool.

Obviously I'm very excited about the possibility of a new Dark Descent, even though I don't like horror games and playing it is about the last thing I want to do—but also something I would absolutely do because it's just that damn good. The report also says Frictional's next "major" game is also in pre-production, so that's very cool too. I've reached out to Frictional to ask what they've got cooking, and will update if I receive a reply.

What a fantastic time to be a horror fan. We've got the most amazing films coming every which-way, countless new indie games to enjoy, and the revitalisation of some of the best horror series gaming has, one of which being Silent Hill with its upcoming game Silent Hill: Townfall.

Part of Silent Hill's revitalisation is a trend of mainline games which take the Silent Hill story and explore it in new locations. Last year we got Silent Hill f which took fans to 1960s rural Japan—exploring the purgatory between tradition and modernity—and this year we have Silent Hill: Townfall set in 1996 St. Amelia, Scotland. What will this game explore? Well, director Jon McKellan gives us some hints.

There are some "very specific reasons why the game is set in this era", McKellan explains in an interview with Eurogamer. "One, that it is on the cusp of when technology started to explode in the home. We started to get the internet. But also who Simon is, the time it's taking place in, the type of town that it's in—all these things are kind of deeply relevant. And by the end of the game, I think people will start to piece together why this is almost like the perfect storm for something to happen in St. Amelia".

Watching the internet seep into communities and homes is terrifying enough, especially as we now know where it'll land us, but I think a more eerie aspect of Townfall could be the death of small towns and communities as people leave the promises of better lives found in major cities.

"Players having empathy for the town and understanding what this town's been through is an important aspect of the story," McKellan explains. "And you write what you know. We know these communities. We grew up in these communities. It felt like if we were going to set it anywhere, it would feel almost disingenuous if we were to set it in an American town, somewhere that we've never experienced and wouldn't know. We wanted to build a town that felt extremely authentic, felt like this was a place you could believe existed. A place you could care about.

"There are a lot of reasons why it's this kind of place and this kind of town, and not in Edinburgh, for example. It's very specific. I wanted it to be something that seemed as believable as possible, and that was the best way to achieve that."

This all sounds like a recipe for guilt, loneliness, and regret—your go-to Silent Hill emotions. "Everyone's got their own vision of what Silent Hill is," McKellan adds. "By the time you finish [a Silent Hill] game, I think everyone in our team—we were all discussing afterwards what we thought happened, and what was our interpretation of it. So, it was a deep and meaningful enough story and subjective enough to allow people to really dig into the theories. And it felt like no matter what your favourite Silent Hill was, that was a core theme."

We're in the count down phase for Silent Hill: Townfall, and while we don't have a preview yet (you're going to have to wait until Gamescom), Screen Burn's director Jon McKellan and series producer Motoi Okamoto have been discussing that next instalment, what fans can expect from the foggy shores of St. Amelia, and what it's like following on from the incredible Silent Hill f.

"For us as a team, I think the best way to describe it is utterly terrifying to be the next one in the series," McKellan says in an interview with Eurogamer. "But it goes without saying that it's an honour to be part of this.

"This is a franchise I grew up with. Silent Hill 1 and 2 became my favourite games when I was a teenager, and the idea that we are now part of this—adding to this franchise that's so beloved by so many people—is a very strange and awesome feeling. We are understandably nervous about releasing the game, given that Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill f were both incredible experiences… [but] we're excited to see how we stack up."

Silent Hill f is certainly a tough act to follow with its beautiful setting, messed up monsters, and surprisingly moving story, but the more I see of Silent Hill: Townfall, the more I'm reassured that Screen Burn is more than up to the task.

You can't really go wrong with a small foggy Scottish town as the setting here, but I'm more interested in what story Screen Burn will explore for St. Amelia. Given it's set in 1996, there's not a lot of mysterious or ancient terrors around, but it is set around the integration of the internet into homes and everyday life, and that sounds plenty scary to me.

"There are themes that feel very reminiscent of Silent Hill," McKellan says. "We are leaning into those expectations. We will be massively subverting those expectations, too. We want people to feel familiar with it, but leverage that. It's leveraging that familiarity to build something new out of that that surprises players and takes them on a different journey, while somehow still feeling like Silent Hill."

I am loving this new age of experimental Silent Hill games that still take clear inspiration from its iconic roots but seek to go slightly left-field with it. Setting games in different locations and time periods is such a great way to accomplish this as well without it feeling too forced.

"I think the core identity we should cherish for Silent Hill is that we have a strong psychological horror narrative, and as long as that remains intact, we feel that we can be more liberal and experimental with what kind of gameplay we take," Okamoto adds. "So I think that's very evident in how Silent Hill 2, last year's Silent Hill F and, of course, Silent Hill: Townfall, are all very different gameplay experiences. We feel that as long as we keep the narrative core intact, there's very much room to keep the gameplay style changing."

As part of an interview in the latest issue of GameInformer (spotted via GamesRadar), Capcom producer Masachika Kawata outlined the resurgent Japanese publisher's approach to Resident Evil: Quality and quantity, with remakes bolstering the process and helping fund the development of more adventurous projects.

According to Kawata, Capcom would like Resident Evil to be a fully annual franchise, but "producing a new entry in the Resident Evil series every year would be quite an undertaking and a difficult task." That's where the remakes come in.

"Being able to revisit older games and remake them helps Capcom meet that goal of releasing a Resident Evil title each year, but it also allows the team to continually challenge themselves and hone their craft," said Kawata. "That's not to say the remakes are any less important. In fact, they're just as important as the mainline titles.

"Capcom is lucky enough to have found this cycle that can continue to provide us with the financial resources to create things like new entries in the Resident Evil series and completely new IP like Pragmata. So there is that relationship there."

Phrases like "every year" tend to get my dander up when it comes to game development, but Capcom has a track record as perhaps one of the most successful and, crucially, healthy game publishers of the 2020s. After a mixed decade-plus in the late aughts and early '10s, it's been hit after hit since the one-two punch of Street Fighter 5 in 2016 and Resident Evil 7 in 2017.

Even its less beloved recent games⁠—like the RE3 remake or Monster Hunter Wilds⁠—have their defenders (not to mention profitable sales figures). Other publishers and developers at Capcom's scale have sloughed off staff and struggled to release games in a timely fashion, but the long-lived giant just keeps trucking.

As GamesRadar pointed out, though, we're running out of runway on Resident Evil remakes after this year's Code Veronica. The OG RE1 GameCube remake was a perfect game I don't think you could improve on⁠—though that didn't stop Capcom from trying with RE4. After that, you've got some pretty mixed reputation entries up for grabs in Residents Evil 0, 5, and 6. I'm not a fan of the three, but as PCG news writer Joshua Wolens has pointed out, why not remake flawed games into good ones instead of mucking up something that already works? Though, the less said about Resident Evil's real stinkers like Survivor or Dead Aim, the better.

First reported by Japanese site GameWatch and translated by Automaton, Silent Hill producer Motoi Okamoto revealed a surprising demand placed on Silent Hill f's scenario (or story) team: Read a ton of books.

Okamoto spoke in a lecture at Japan's CEDEC 2026⁠—that's "CESA Developer's Conference" longwise, or "Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association Developer's Conference" extra longwise.

In his talk, "The Art of Producing Silent Hill," Okamoto said that he believes being well-read is an important trait for videogame producers to cultivate, and that reading the entire body of work by any game writer he collaborated with was a matter of "basic respect."

But that drive for literacy doesn't just stop with Okamoto. In the interest of having strong "input" for the developers, Okamoto said that, "within the team, we put pressure on each other, especially among the scenario writers, to read at least 100 to 200 books a year."

That's a lotta books, man. I've been working on my reading habit, and I'll be happy if I crack 20 this year, with a bullish forecast for a two-a-month pace in 2027. I'm usually circumspect of workplace quotas or "KPIs" (key performance indicators), but this is one I can get behind. Books are good for you.

I really caught on Okamoto's mention of "input:" Having a base of artistic inspiration outside videogames is something I've heard many other veteran developers stress. Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer recently spoke about being influenced by fine art, cinema, and theater in a video on his YouTube channel.

Last year, Final Fantasy composer Nobuou Uematsu lamented the stagnation he saw in game music, which he partly attributed to new composers overly relying on other videogame music for inspiration.

Update: A24 has confirmed on social media via a Backrooms film account that it "makes no claim of ownership over the yellow wallpaper, the original post referencing it, or any of the community works that have since been built around it." And explains that the takedown was an automated claim and "we immediately began the process to reverse it and reinstate the listings."

Kane Parsons' The Backrooms film was a huge success, which wasn't surprising given his history with self-made backrooms projects released on YouTube. But even so, it was fantastic to see a story which was born on the internet and celebrated by so many indie games get its moment in the limelight. Unfortunately, A24 is taking a hammer to all that good grace.

First reported by Reddit user GnarlyNet, A24 has apparently been going around and requesting takedowns of backrooms-inspired artwork, in this case a wallpaper pattern. A24 did release a special edition wallpaper for fans to buy which matched that inside the backrooms to celebrate the film release, but the problem is that much of the artwork being taken down is inspired by the original backrooms image that appeared on the internet years ago, before the film.

"It is a recreation of the pattern from the well-known 2019 image who started the whole backrooms lore," GnarlyNet explains. "I find it disappointing to see a company attempt to claim such a broad connection to a concept that has been developed, shared, and loved by an online community for years. I would have hoped that A24 would celebrate that creative history rather than take action against independent artists who were, just like them, inspired by it.

"I respect the rights attached to any specific film adaptation, but those rights should not be treated as ownership of the entire Backrooms concept, its broader visual language, or the community lore surrounding it. I am sharing this because I think it raises an important question about what happens when large companies adapt community-created internet culture."

Apparently, the specific complaint was submitted "on behalf of 'A24 Films LLC'" but GnarlyNet cannot "independently confirm who submitted the complaint" beyond what information Redbubble provided them.

Regardless of the reason why the artwork has been taken down, John Backrooms himself, Kane Parsons has stepped in and confirmed that he will be looking into the matter: "I'm looking into this. Should not be happening." He said in reply to the initial Reddit post.

I very much hope this is an unfortunate misunderstanding. The backrooms has always been a community-led project which has massively benefited from all the numerous and varied contributions from fans. It would be a shame for a big company to step in and tread all over that tradition.

If you so much as flicked through a PC gaming magazine in the mid '90s, you'll probably recognise the name Ecstatica. Created by Londoner Andrew Spencer and published by Psygnosis, the series spawned two instalments: the first released in 1994 and is a medieval-themed survival horror. The second arrived in 1997, and while it's very distinctly an Ecstatica game by dint of its art style, it dialed back the horror elements quite a bit.

That art style is pretty crucial: instead of polygonal character models, Ecstatica's engine used ellipsoids, which are, well, roundish. Bulbous even. Rather than paraphrase the formula-ridden Wikipedia page for ellipsoids, it's probably easier just to show you this:

It's a pretty distinctive art style, and famously, Andrew Spencer wrote the engine himself from scratch. The ellipsoids are real as well: other games that have a similar art style, like Little Big Adventure for instance, implement Gouraud shading to create the effect of softness where there's actually a hard angle.

As Spencer told Next Generation in 1996: "The main advantage is the organic-looking characters. Triangles tend to make hard, robotic-looking figures, whereas ellipsoids can be used to create more rounded, human alternatives. Ellipsoids can also be more efficient because you can make a much better looking character out of fewer shapes."

I doubt many people would describe Ecstatica's characters as "organic-looking" from the vantage point of 2026, but I do remember being blown away by the look of these games in static magazine screenshots. Compared to, say, Alone in the Dark, it looked decidedly like a step up, even if in reality it was a step sideways.

I'm sure it's easy to find Ecstatica and its sequel online, but they've not been commercially available for decades. That's about to change: they're among a new round of SNEG reissues, which also includes the 2001 Dungeons & Dragons RPG Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor, 1997 3D action game Dark Earth, 2001 turn-based strategy Warlords 4, and 1998 military tactics sim Soldiers at War.

Obviously, as with the vast majority of early '90s PC horror, Ecstatica will probably feel stiff and unmanageable to most modern players. Like Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark, both instalments use tank controls, and their 3D worlds are viewed from fixed camera perspectives. Both also lean on puzzle solving and amusing instant death scenarios. Still, I reckon the occasional torment is worth it just to see the still-gorgeous ellipsoid art in motion.

Ecstatica and Ecstatica 2 will come to Steam and GOG later this year. For more, check out Richard Cobbett on the original Ecstatica.

If you've forgotten Silent Hill: Downpour it was the western-developed Silent Hill that went semi-open world and had a bunch of sidequests in it, but was still a bit too busy trying to retell Silent Hill 2 only with the villain in a different hat. It wasn't a disaster, but to say "at least it wasn't Silent Hill: Homecoming or the arcade game" is to damn it with such faint praise you may as well be whispering from the other side of the street.

Still, those sidequests were tasty. Ignore the main plot about a prison escapee being chased by embodiments of his own guilt—wow, a man in prison has a dark past, what a shocking development—and you could explore a town full of ghost stories and little mysteries. The one where you follow color-coded ribbons to find out what happened to a missing girl was a particular favorite, a reminder that Silent Hill can still be properly haunting when it tries.

Good luck trying to play it today, though. Downpour came out on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and absolutely nothing else, which means your best bet is probably to emulate it in RPCS3. Or to wait for a PC native port to come along, and what's that? Oh, it's a trailer for a PC native port someone's been chipping away at.

Indie_RU's port isn't just a way to play Downpour on PC with an uncapped framerate and higher resolutions, nice as that always is. It's also restoring cut content, letting us wield extra weapons like the Bogeyman's hammer and bringing back deleted cutscenes, notes, dialogue, and entire sidequests. It's also restored a boss battle seen in an early trailer where you fight the "Monocle Man" who was reduced to a cameo in the finished game.

Apparently we can expect the finished product around September/October, which is also when we're expecting Silent Hill: Townfall, Screen Burn Interactive's Scottish take on the series. I've got my fingers crossed that's going to push the series in an interesting direction, because all those arena battles in Silent Hill F weren't really my cup of rusty tea with mud in it, or whatever they drink in Silent Hill.

I've developed a bit of a reputation among my coworkers for loving niche, lo-fi indie games that make you feel bad and gross and weird on the inside. I'm flattered to stand out in such a way, but I also don't ever want to be typecast. Anyway, Brno Transit is a game about being trapped underground with your nasty, weirdly sexual boss and neurotic coworkers as reality disintegrates around you.

I loved developer Spytihněv's previous game, the Soviet boomer shooter Hrot, so I've been eagerly awaiting his next project. Much like fellow FPS designer David Szymanski (Dusk, Iron Lung), Spytihněv zigged rather than zagging, following up Hrot with a short narrative horror game rather than another shooter.

You're a novice train conductor learning the ropes under Brno, the second city of the Czech Republic. It's "the dampest subway east of anything that matters," according to Spytihněv, and I think it helps set the tone out of the gate to know that Brno does not have a subway system in real life.

What follows is a surreal, scatological (a Spytihněv signature), and homoerotic (that's new!) delve into guys being dudes on the job. For me, it called to mind Szymanski's Iron Lung (but more fleshy, sexual, and human) or 2024's breakout Mouthwashing (but not as character driven, and somehow even less life-affirming). The controversial Horses also sprang to mind, but with less explicitly harrowing subject matter⁠—and more explicit full-frontal nudity, let's go boys.

Even more than Mouthwashing, which portrays one of the most evil fictional workplaces I've ever seen, Brno Transit captured the feeling of starting a job where you matter so little as to want to die, while the apathy and neglect of your coworkers is somehow even worse than if they actively hated you.

This game runs on surprise, so I'll try to talk around the real zinger moments, but it's one long sequence of "Go here, do this. Why did you do that? Now you have to fix it. Embarrassing." If you've ever talked to a coworker at a shit job and felt like they were a space alien playing a prank on you with how they think and view the world, Brno Transit will speak to you on some level.

Your first day ends with you eating a tainted hot dog that gives you the runs and the voms, sending you scrambling for a bathroom as gurgles and whines fill your headphones. The doorless, exposed toilet in the employee area is indefinitely occupied when you reach it, while the bathroom in the station above is out of order. I don't know if there's another way of finishing this bit, but I had to take the train to another station to find an open commode. I haven't shared this exact stress dream or level of gastrointestinal distress, but it was still incredibly gnarly and relatable in the moment.

You black out and wake up on a dirty floor mattress in the conductors' area, with splotches of feces and a trail of brown footprints trailing backwards from your resting place. Out in the depot, an entire train is covered in crap, and the first order of the day is to hose it off, Powerwash Simulator-style. How could this have all been you?

Events only get stranger and grosser from there, and I was hooked. Brno Transit shares a brown, desolate, hopeless world with the preceding Hrot, despite being set closer to the modern day. It's a new standout of the mundane or on the job horror subgenre. I want these awful subway stations to get love like the Backrooms or Exit 8.

Model trains

Brno Transit is a medley of nastiness punctuated with surreal hilarity, and while much of the humor is front-and-center in the scripted story, one of my favorite moments was emergent: I had to do a double take out of the corner of my eye to notice a passenger randomly hanging off the end of a train as it left the station. The simulated little world of Brno Transit, which exists whether you're paying attention to it or not, is what really takes it to the next level.

Undergirding the scripted story stuff is a continuous simulation of a small subway system with two lines, one counter- and the other clockwise. It feels like zooming into someone's model train set, and does a superb job of evoking a much larger world than what's just in front of you.

A diverse array of NPCs mill about the stations or wander on and off the trains. They have this sense of anonymity and guarded hostility that really nailed the feeling of making eye contact with strangers on the subway⁠. You don't matter to them, don't bother them.

This effect, plus the the shifting and jostling of the train cars, the way the lighting changes as you pass through tunnels, as well as Spytihněv's excellent sound, music, and foley work add up to this uncanny feel of actually riding the subway. I was reminded of how no one's done nighttime better than Thief or Thief 2, even with their aged graphics. These three games are punching well above their weight in art and atmosphere.

You have to ride the train to start, but you quickly take control of your own engine, carefully adjusting your acceleration to avoid hitting stops too late or too early, doing your best to slot seamlessly into the pre-existing schedule of trains constantly running on this loop. It's a simplified approximation of a whole-hog train sim like Densha de Go!

A free ride mode unlocks after completing the story, and I feel like there's all kinds of weirdness left to discover under Brno. At one point in the story, I stumbled into a skull-filled catacomb attached to one of the stations, with unnerving music, a confusing, switchback layout, and a bumbling tourist snapping photos. I thought for sure this was part of the critical path, but it was just there. What other odd shit is waiting for me at all the stops I never explored on the critical path?

Brno Transit would have been an easy recommendation for me at $9 if it was just the standout surreal horror narrative adventure, but the fact that it's built on top of this little model train world truly sets it apart. I love this freaky little game, I love a Spytihněv joint, and I can't wait to see what he does next.

Isla de las Muñecas, the Mexican island that holds the Guinness World Record for largest collection of haunted dolls, served as the inspiration for Where Dolls Hang, a survival horror game where you play a detective searching for people who've gone missing in a particularly cursed location.

"Players must investigate missing person cases by examining bodies, collecting clues, placing evidence markers, and documenting crime scenes with an in-game camera," says developer Steelkrill Studio's press release, "all while surviving the dangers lurking within the woods."

One way those clues are found is via VHS tapes, which you can take back to your safehouse to watch. And that's where you can also watch public domain horror movies like Night of the Living Dead, if you want to take a busman's holiday from the horror of the game.

When Night of the Living Dead was released in 1968, US copyright law required a visible copyright notice. But though the movie had a copyright notice under its original title, when it was called Night of the Flesh Eaters, it was left off the screen when the title was changed to Night of the Living Dead before release. That's why it's in the public domain, and why you can freely download it from the Internet Archive or add it to your videogame.

I'm curious what other public domain horror movies will be included in Where Dolls Hang. There are plenty to choose from. Manos: The Hand of Fate, Plan 9 From Outer Space, The Screaming Skull, Maniac, The Brain That Wouldn't Die, Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors and The Wasp Woman, maybe White Zombie to stick with the theme?

Where Dolls Hang is scheduled for release this year. Check out its Steam page for more information.

Ahead of Carcass Clad's reveal at last month's PC Gaming Show, I had the chance to speak to Wrong Organ devs Jeffrey Tomec and Dave van Egdom about the studio's follow-up to its breakout hit, Mouthwashing. Carcass Clad is a very different sort of game, but with familiar themes and atmosphere. The bulk of our conversation, though, was about why the studio pivoted to co-op multiplayer, and how it feels to play.

It's a pretty warmed-over bias these days to assume any studio swapping from single to multiplayer is "selling out" in some way, but Tomec and van Egdom told me they hadn't even set out to make a co-op game initially⁠—Wrong Organ was just following the path of least resistance to the tank game it wanted to make.

"There was quite a bit of hesitation, but it also wasn't even the original premise for the game," Tomec said of the switch to co-op. "We had a cool idea for a tank game, and it was going to be a tank game where you control three people at once. Then we were like, 'That seems like it could just be a co-op game.' And now it's a co-op game."

"[The switch to co-op] happened very early in development," said van Egdom. "I think we first started talking about 'Tank Game,' as we refer to it, [around] July 2024. We did the first ideation stuff, and then it was only like three months later that Jeff pitched making it a co-op thing instead."

Tomec explained that, if the goal of Mouthwashing was to support its excellent script as much as possible through gameplay and visuals, the driving vision of Carcass Clad is to recreate the frantic, claustrophobic scenes from tank movies as emergent gameplay. Wrong Organ wants players to keep stumbling into scenes like the scripted one in Carcass Clad's reveal trailer.

"Our players have probably made a bit of a mistake in the trailer by getting jumped by an enemy tank around a corner, but we expect players in reality tend to make those kinds of mistakes pretty often," said Tomec. "It can be very stressful and very hard to see with how cramped the vehicle is, so things tend to find a way to sneak up on you."

Specialization

Each player has a specific, narrow role in how they contribute to the tank's success, with a team consisting of a driver, a gunner, and a commander. The first two are fairly self-explanatory, but both of those more hands-on play styles will be hampered by a lack of visibility and information, with the cramped, dark tank interior only providing narrow viewports to see outside.

Tomec told me that all three roles will be able to open a hatch and see outside the vehicle, but you don't want to do that during a fight. Hell, it might be a bad idea to do that when you're not actively fighting, lest somebody get the drop on you. "Up with miniskirts" indeed.

From our conversation and Carcass Clad's screenshots, drivers will be almost blind when piloting the vehicle⁠—they can't get a better view and move at the same time⁠—while it sounds like gunners will be limited to a super zoomed-in, scoped view unless they're poking their heads out. I'm picturing something like an FPS sniper who can't leave their aim-down-sights mode. That's where the third role comes in.

The commander gets the most complete set of information, but no direct control of the tank's function⁠—Tomec called it "the man in the chair fantasy"—and the core challenge of Carcass Clad seems to be the commander providing clear instruction and context to the other two, and them acting on it as effectively as possible.

"Being in a tank really just means you can't see shit around you," said van Egdom. "[Commanders] have access to a periscope, they can range find, they can do all of those things, make callouts, send drawings of the map and which route to take to their fellow crewmates, etc."

Tomec said Wrong Organ's goal is to "have everyone feel empowered in their own way, and really disempowered in their own way, where you feel like you're relying on each other, but also don't feel like it's just your commander yelling at you to do stuff."

Friendsweat

Tomec said that Wrong Organ took equal inspiration from military simulation games and the burgeoning "friendslop" genre of co-op multiplayer, but the final result diverges from both. Even though the co-op climbing game Peak, for instance, can have its moments of challenge and heartbreak, Carcass Clad sounds like it's in a completely different ballpark.

"We almost call ourselves a friendsweat game, if we had had to put a genre label on it," Tomec said. "We're definitely not quite at Peak, but we're not trying to make Arma either." He wants Carcass Clad to have a lot of what milsim players appreciate about the genre⁠—attention to detail, tactility, plus a high level of challenge and consequence⁠—but in a more fantastical setting divorced from high playercount PvP.

"My analogous example would be Helldivers," said Tomec. "The way that Helldivers explores a ton of military simulator mechanics in a framework that's very far from a milsim, and we'd like to be almost a tank equivalent of that."

I was very curious about those titular carcass clad tanks, and Tomec told me that this was largely something only enemy vehicles would be taking advantage of, mostly as a sort of improvised armor we'll have to chew through before damaging the tank itself. Having only enemy tanks be carcass clad was partially a practical concern with the game's perspective⁠—we won't be seeing the outside of the tank very much⁠—but we'll still have some ways of getting weird with it.

"You might find yourself with some weird shit inside the tank, and some of that weird, carcassy horror entering your vehicle," said Tomec. "But from a gameplay layer, armoring yourself is not much of a focus, it's most of the enemies doing it."

Mouthwashing was a game that left me so stressed and depressed, I had to go lie down for awhile afterward⁠—I had a similar experience reading the transcript of a recent PlayStation investor meeting. It sounds like Carcass Clad will evoke similar feelings in an actionized, co-op, run-based format. But there will be some quiet time too. Maybe.

"You will have some breaks. A run isn't just sitting there for two hours, constantly moving," said van Egdom. "There's a kind of Left 4 Dead run structure, where you'll have safe rooms in between, and in safe rooms you're very likely to be able to leave the tank.

"I say 'likely', because this is just where we're at in development. We could change fucking everything, man. We're going to do what we have to to make the tank cool. That's the baseline."

After blowing the doors down with narrative horror game Mouthwashing, developer Wrong Organ decided to zig instead of zag: Its next project is Carcass Clad, a roguelike co-op tank simulator in a city where things have gone deeply wrong. But while developer Jeffrey Tomec told me that scripted narrative is on the "back burner for sure" this time, it sounds like Wrong Organ is trying to find a balance for its love of story and worldbuilding.

"We're looking into the best way to do it, but the reality is, every one of our games is made from a core [idea]," said Tomec. "Mouthwashing was, how do we make the script into a video game? Everything in this game comes back to the tank, and how you feel in it, and that is supposed to express something."

Tomec referenced a clash that's burned me in games like Destiny, Redfall, and even the co-op mode of System Shock 2: Players are in a different headspace when playing multiplayer, and that can leave your attempts at storytelling ignored, or worse, obnoxiously intrusive.

"We haven't fully discovered exactly how much we can push it," Tomec said of injecting more overt narrative into Carcass Clad. "Our temptation is always to go and start putting that in our games, and I think we're gonna have to see how much of that fits in here before we start. We strongly believe that narrative shouldn't feel forced.

"You need to understand where someone wants to read, where that's going to add to someone's experience, and where it's going to be you spitting stuff onto the page. Because we're a writing company, we put writing in our games."

But even in the scenario where Carcass Clad winds up almost pure gameplay with minimal script, it sounds like the team has a lot of pent up story and world building it's dying to share. For starters, Tomec explicitly told me that this is an entirely separate setting from that of Mouthwashing. These World War 2-looking tank battles aren't part of the Tulpar crew's distant past or something.

"This world also isn't new to us as a studio," said Tomec. "It's new to anything we've shipped to the public, but we've been talking about the setting for a while. We have stories we may want to tell in this universe. There's a lot more than maybe is going to actually come across in the experience.

"I have the write-up where that explains stuff that might happen story-wise in either this game or the setting outside of the playable experience. But it's always a question of like, is this game actually the effective way to deliver a lot of that, or is that maybe going to be another game, or are we going to decide that we actually hate this setting and ditch it the second this game comes out? There is a lot of thought that's gone into the setting and story."

You can already catch a glimpse of that in Carcass Clad's description on Steam: "The city's saint, long since laid to rest, walks again⁠—gilded and defiled." Sounds messed up and freaky. I expected no less. Carcass Clad does not yet have a release date, but you can wishlist it on Steam.

Ahead of co-op tank sim Carcass Clad's reveal trailer at the PC Gaming Show, I got to speak to Wrong Organ devs Jeffrey Tomec and Dave van Egdom about the studio's upcoming third game. The elephant in the room: Carcass Clad is a huge departure from the studio's breakout hit, Mouthwashing, a singleplayer narrative horror game.

"This game is a statement in some ways, it could seem weird," said Tomec. "We made a story game and you loved it, but now we're doing something [that's] nothing like that, and to an extent, there's a little bit that we definitely don't want to pigeonhole ourselves."

There are definitely commonalities between Mouthwashing and Carcass Clad, the things that Tomec and the others feel are essential to a Wrong Organ game: Themes of dehumanization, innovative deployments of gore and body horror, plus a sense of the mundane gone wrong, a workplace transplanted to an impossible situation. But written narrative is taking more of a backseat.

In addition to wanting to prove something about Wrong Organ, Tomec admitted they also just wanted to mix things up. "Mouthwashing was like, 'God, I wish I was making a shooter right now,'" he joked. But that seems to have come back around.

"We really liked working on Mouthwashing, and I think this deep in the development of any game, [the] grass is greener⁠," said Tomec. "Like, I miss working on Mouthwashing! Now that we've been in this tank⁠—we just got off like, four months of just designing these little components and being like, 'Actually, this gear doesn't rotate this other gear correctly.'"

It sounds like a return to something more narrative-driven isn't out of the question for Wrong Organ in the future, but Tomec thinks they needed to build more capacity and expertise to improve on their own work. "How do you make [Wrong Organ's first game] How Fish is Made better? Well, you make it not 20 minutes long," said Tomec. "That's the easiest explanation. So, we made a two-hour game … But now it's like, what's the natural progression of Mouthwashing?

"Mouthwashing isn't better if it's eight hours. Probably. It's not easy, it's not a direct scale up. How do we fundamentally change the formula to make something that's worth more time to the player than Mouthwashing? And in our eyes, a lot of that is finding a way to get that unique Wrong Organ vibe⁠—our stories and our writing⁠—and to put that into something big, into something that has a real gameplay layer and feels like a super cohesive experience."

That sounds sick as hell, and definitely a game I want to play, but it would also be "a huge undertaking" according to Tomec. "We don't feel ready to fully deliver that right now," he said. "The idea is, we're saying, 'We made the 'story game,' now we make the 'gameplay game,' and then after that we can sit down and decide, are we ready to make the 'gameplay story game?''"

We won't exactly be bereft waiting for that gameplay story game: Carcass Clad, the 'just gameplay' game, looks gnarly as hell. It does not currently have a release date, but you can wishlist the claustrophobic tank sim on Steam.

XOntos, the next game from acclaimed Amnesia horrorsmiths Frictional Games, is delayed—instead of being out later this year as originally planned, the studio said today that it will drop in 2027 instead.

No mention of Grand Theft Auto 6 was made in the delay announcement, although with the second half of 2026 now in full swing and Rockstar's colossus bearing down on the world with increasing speed, I tend to assume that it's at least on the periphery of any game delay into '27. In the case of Ontos, though, Frictional said it simply wants to get it right.

"Ontos is our most ambitious game to date, both in terms of its size and scale, and in the depth and layers of our story and gameplay," the studio wrote on X. "In order to deliver this vision, we have decided to push the release of Ontos to 2027. We look forward to sharing more updates about Ontos, our characters, and our world soon."

Frictional's Amnesia games are spectacularly scary, but also relatively conventional as these things go. Ontos, by contrast, will new more closely to the studio's 2015 release Soma: Frictional said in January that it is not trying to make Ontos "a stressful or scary game in the traditional sense," but that it wants players to "grapple with heavy and thought provoking themes. The goal is to evoke this deep existential terror that stays long after you finish playing."

That sure worked with Soma. The Amnesia games had me screaming, crying, and throwing up in the moment, but more than a decade down the road it's Soma that still makes me sit back in my chair every now and then and think, what the hell. (There were moments of screaming, crying, throwing up in that one too, but they were much fewer and farther-between.) So, yeah, definitely eager for more of that, and if it means waiting until next year, I'm happy to do it.

Microsoft is going through another big 'reset', which is a nice way of saying culling, as it reportedly prepares to cut major games and studios as part of reassessing its videogame investments. But amid all the carnage, Hideo Kojima's OD is apparently unscathed.

According to IGN, a source familiar with Microsoft's plans implied the upcoming horror game remains in the works at Kojima Productions alongside Xbox Publishing. This news comes as Microsoft says it's "taking a fresh look at where we invest so we're focusing on our highest priorities." And honestly, I can't say I'm surprised that OD qualifies as one.

Kojima carries quite a bit of weight around this industry, just ask Geoff Keighley, but OD doesn't just feature his work—acclaimed director Jordan Peele is also reportedly collaborating with Kojima on this one. Add that to its star studded cast which includes the likes of Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer, and the late Udo Kier, and you get a game that's considerably harder to axe.

The proof is also in the pudding—this isn't the first time OD has escaped from harm. Almost exactly a year ago today, we saw unfortunately familiar circumstances play out when Microsoft laid off 9,000 employees, cancelling games like Everwild and the Perfect Dark reboot—just one moment in its year of shame. OD survived this as well.

Phil Spencer, former Xbox boss, signed the game, and his new replacement Asha Sharma has since shared her enthusiasm for the project: "I've got great artists and creatives that can pick a great game better than I can, and so I want to give it space, but most importantly, I think it just represents another kind of game." Kojima has previously said (in a classic Kojima way) that he doesn't even view OD as a game, instead being "a movie, but at the same time a new form of media." Sure, why not?

We won't know for sure whether OD is truly in the clear until Microsoft releases a definitive statement on the supposed upcoming layoffs, but if IGN's source is to be believed, OD will once again survive and carry on its already three-year long development.